Between Christmas and New Year, when students have gone home for their midwinter frolic, university scientists are accustomed to put down their textbooks and laboratory tools and go on a busman's holiday. Soberly they attend dozens of conventions, read thousands of papers, talk shop, elect officers, award prizes, take stock of a year's progress, get their names in the newspapers, mingle with a sprinkling of industrial colleagues. Last week geologists convened in Cincinnati, geographers in Syracuse, mathematicians in Durham, N. C., philosophers in Cambridge, astronomers in Frederick, Md. (see p. 52), anthropologists in Washington, chemists in Manhattan and Princeton. As usual, the biggest and best publicized gathering was that of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which had chosen Atlantic City for a meeting place, and where, if he wished, an ichthyologist could listen to an atom-smasher and a cosmologist to a breeder of fruit flies.
When British scientists get together, they like to speculate and philosophize. take a "broad view," argue publicly and sometimes acrimoniously. In Atlantic City, A. A. A. S. officers and bigwigs made more theoretical and philosophical speeches than usual last week, but there was a fine display of devices to feed the traditional appetite of U. S. science for neat experiments and clever machines (see p. 50). There was a burglar alarm which fills a room with ultrashort radio waves, so that a person stepping into the room interrupts the waves and actuates the signal. There was a photoelectric meter which determines the Vitamin D content of a cod-liver oil sample by passing a light beam through it.
Dr. James Franklin Yeager of the Department of Agriculture projected on a screen a cardiogram from the beating heart of a cockroach. This was obtained by exposing the heart of the insect and placing on it a minute drop of wax. A human hair inserted in the wax was connected through a lever to a fine wire. The heart beats thus jerked the wire and a light beam passing across it translated them into a pulsating graph. The Department uses this method to study the cardiac effect of insecticides.
Noteworthy discussions:
X-rays v. Cells. Using X-ray bombardments much more prolonged and severe than those employed in medicine, Dr. Hugo Fricke of the Long Island Biological Laboratory arrived at a theory of what happens when an X-ray photon (unit of radiation) is received in a living cell. The high energy carried on the photon swings the electrons of the cell up to correspondingly high energy levels which represent temperatures of 1,000,000°. This lasts for only some .00001 sec., but large protein molecules may be broken up, carbon dioxide and hydrogen given off, and water molecules in the cell oxidized to hydrogen peroxide. The cell may then sicken and die. If it is a cell in the reproductive germ plasm, a mutation or hereditary change may occur.