ABSTRACT
Chargaff, Erwin . . . Scientists, like little fishes, swim in schools. When we open one of our scientific journals these days, we find a very uneven distribution of topics. Some important fields are almost entirely neglected, others seem to explode into bursts of unbelievable mediocrity. Really valuable contributions in the fields most in vogue at present probably are just as scarce as those dealing with the stepchildren of present-day biochemistry. But not all disciplines make it so easy to call each mush a “homogenate”, each soup a “partially purified extract”, and so to speak-when you have nothing whatever-of a “system”. There is a real danger that our science may suffocate in its own excrements.
