Postscript: Political Science
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tween conductors and insulators, so you could very well call them semi-
insulators; the meaning would be the same. My opponent was playing a
crude game. While saying these derogatory things about me, he was
actually agreeing with my conclusion, merely u»ing a different term.
This man's antagonism had begun a couple of years before. When
Andy Bassett and I had finished our work on the piezoelectric effect in
bone, we wrote it up, submitted it to a scientific journal, and got it
accepted. Unbeknownst to us, this fellow had been working on the same
thing, but hadn't gotten as far in his experiments as we. Somehow he
learned of our work and its impending publication. He called Andy,
asking us to delay our report until he was ready to publish his own data.
Andy called me to talk it over. What counts in the scientific literature is
priority; he was asking us to surrender it. There was no ethical basis for
his request, and I would never have thought of asking him to delay had
the situation been reversed. I said, "Not on your life." Our paper was
published, and we'd acquired a "friend" for life.
Now there he was at the microphone trying to scuttle my presentation
with a little ambiguous double-talk. I thought, "He must be doing the
same work as we are again. If he wins this encounter, I'll have trouble
getting my data published, and he'll have a clear field for his." Instead
of defending the data, I explained that semi-insulator and semiconductor
were one and the same. I said I was surprised he didn't know that, but I
appreciated his approval of my data! Someone else in the audience stood
up in support of my position, and the crisis was past. The lab isn't the
only place a scientist has to stay alert.
In 1964, soon after the National Institutes of Health approved the
grant for our continuing work on bone, I received the VA's William S.
Middleton Award for outstanding research. That's a funny little story in
itself. The award is given by the VA's Central Office (VACO), whose
members had already decided on me, but candidates must be nominated
by regional officers, and the local powers were determined I shouldn't
get it. Eventually VACO had to order them to nominate me.
The award put me on salary from Washington instead of Syracuse,
and due to pressure from VACO I was soon designated the local chief of
research, replacing the man who signed all the papers at once. I was
determined to put the research house in order, and I instituted a number
of reforms, such as public disclosure of the funding allocations, and pro-
ductivity requirements, no matter how prominent an investigator might
be. Many of the reforms have been adopted throughout the VA system.
They didn't
make
me more popular,
however. Over
the next several
years there was continuous pressure from the medical school to allocate