Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science Read Online Free PDF Page B

no alternative to animal experimentation if we were to advance science and medicine.
    The spring term was emotionally overshadowed by the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12 and the end of the war in Europe less than a month later. Hutchins saw V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe, as an occasion for a major statement and assembled the student body on the morning of May 8 in Rockefeller Chapel. Like many of my friends, my thoughts were of dismantling forever the German military machine that had inflicted on humanity two catastrophic world wars. Hutchins, however, majestically warned against lawless revenge that would go against the ideals for the sake of which we had entered the war. Given the day, the speech was an extraordinarily brave gesture that made me ashamed of my having espoused Henry Morganthau's proposal to reduce Germany to a nonindustrialized, pastoral country.
    Academically this was my best term, the first one in which I received two As—one in physiology, the other in my first advanced divisional course, Botany 234, Physiographic Ecology. This latter course, taught by Charles Olmstead, was a walkover devoted to elucidating differences in plant life as a function of the environment. I spent that summer on a tiny island just off Door County, the long thin peninsula that separates Wisconsin's Green Bay from northern Lake Michigan. With Japanese power in full retreat and the war likely to end soon, there was no longer reason to hurry my education with summer schooling. I opted for a camp counselor position that would bring me into real northern wilderness, away from the oppressively humid heat of most Chicago summers. Though I was underqualified, being neither a strong swimmer nor an experienced boatman, the proprietor was sorely in need of staff, and I became the camp's first “nature” counselor.
    Despite being so out of place, I enjoyed most days, slipping away whenever possible into the dense tangle of spruce and fir trees that surrounded the campgrounds. I could walk the perimeter of the island in less than a half hour, ever hopeful that a rare shorebird would fly by. One day this wish was royally granted when three majestic Hudsonian curlews flew within twenty feet of my observation spot. In mid-August the radio brought news of the first atom bombs having been dropped on Japan and the immediate end of the war; it was proof of the superweapon concept, which had brought my uncle Bill to the University of Chicago and its Ryerson Physical Laboratory. Later I eagerly read the Chicago Tribune's detailed account of the University of Chicago's key contribution, the first sustained nuclear reaction produced by man; it had been accomplished in the atomic pile constructed by physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, underneath the west football stands where I played handball.
    Upon returning to school for the fall 1945 quarter, I decided to risk losing my scholarship aid by taking more difficult courses. Almost all my choices were quantitative, as I simultaneously took calculus, chemistry, and physics. Balancing chemical equations was only mildly painful, and I received two As and a B. But I was much less at home with calculus, getting a B in differential calculus and then a C in the next quarter's integral calculus. So I took no further math to give more attention to my physics course. Though the instructor, Mario Iona, took a seemingly perverse pleasure in penalizing us for wrong guesses on his multiple-choice physics quizzes, I hit my stride by the spring term and pulled my grade up to an A.
    All through the year I was taking Oil (Observation, Interpretation, and Integration), the most philosophically oriented of all the surveys and the last required course I needed for my degree. Again I had good fortune regarding the instructor: Joseph Schwab, whose languorous southern tone could never hide his disdain for crap answers to precise Socratic questioning in my Humanities I class. Now that I had learned to