The Glands Regulating Personality by M.D. Louis Berman
page 46 of 426 (10%)
page 46 of 426 (10%)
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peculiar to the rooster, were completely lost. The inference was the
existence of an internal secretion. To Berthold belongs the honor of being the first experimental demonstrator who proved the reality of a gland with a true internal secretion and the power it exercised through the blood upon the entire organism. Besides, he showed that a typical gland of external secretion could also have an internal secretion, a possibility never before considered. That two kinds of cells could live within the same gland: one set usually recognized as producing the external secretion, the other evolving the internal secretion, was an astounding original conception. ENTER CLAUDE BERNARD Science is supposed to be immune to the personal prejudices and emotional habits of the vulgar. It is the tradition that a new contribution to knowledge emerging from no matter how obscure the source, should be hailed as a gift from the gods. But the sad truth of the matter is that a new finding in science requires as much backing as a new project in high finance or social climbing. Berthold, like Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a great pioneer. But there was no personage, no person of consequence, with no patronage by anyone of consequence, no wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate him. His poor four little pages of a report, published ten years before Darwin's "Origin of Species," attracted not the slightest notice. Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of possibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have been interested enough to read it, but without any recorded reaction on the part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan. Though it was good, |
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