.MTM5Nw.MTIwNzYz

14

of a group from The University of Michigan which had performed the quantative determinations. Now it happened that I was working in a closely related field and was familiar with the techniques which were employed for such determinations. Mainly, it depended on paper chromatography which is a tedious process by which an extract of steroids is dropped in a very small, measured amount on the end of a long strip of filter paper which has been treated with an appropriate solvent. Under standard conditions, the drop containing whatever steroids were present in the extract, is allowed to travel along the moist paper, which is hung in a special chamber for a given number of hours. The rate of travel serves to separate each hormone and by developing the strip, it is possible to see the size of the spots made by the various hormones in a pure state, and the spots can even be quantitively removed and measured. The whole thing is very ingenious, but it was terribly tedious and cumbersome, and far from reliable even when I used to move through the whole process alone. There are too many steps, and each step has its weak point. And when the technique was first used, it worked out fairly well for cortisone and for hydrocortisone, but aldosterone, present in much smaller amounts, failed to show up with the same pair of solvents, hence its relationship to the others - particularly, cortisone and hydrocortisone - remained a little vague. So, on the occasion of the meeting that I've referred to, and the paper on the aldosterone secreting [?], the flush of my first admiration faded suddenly when it occured to me to wonder if it was actually true. I remembered that the leader of the two research groups were good friends and that the pressure from the medical schools and from the sources of federal grants-in-aid is very great. It's produce, or else lose your grant. On the other hand, there are so many highly-specialized techniques that almost no group is able to asses the contributions of another, hence the ultimate analysis, to declare them "reproducible" or "not reproducible" or, in simple English, true or false. Sometimes I wonder