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in writing, and soon I received a nice letter expressing "deep regrets" for
the "rather garbled" press release and belatedly acknowledging that he
would never have done any regeneration work without the stimulus of
Smith's experiments, which in turn had descended from mine.
The point of summarizing this embarrassing behavior is that, at about
the same time he was talking with the Purdue press office, this gen-
tleman was also writing the "impartial" review of Andy's proposal. We
know who did the job because, in the small family of regeneration work-
ers, the fellow's contentious style and his practice of quoting mainly his
own research are immediately recognizable. His critique repeated some
of the same old charges against my own work, even though the proposal
wasn't mine. At one point he objected that one of Andy's experimental
controls was to use the devices on healthy bone. He sniffed, "I am not
aware that physicians are electrically stimulating uninjured bone in hu-
mans." Of course they weren't, but that part of the procedure was the
perfect way to test for side effects in normal bone—the whole point of
the experiment. The reviewer also wondered why some of the animals
were to be sacrificed after one or two months while looking for long-
term effects, knowing as well as any researcher that this was the normal
way of following changes in tissue. After all this, he complained that
there were no controls, when in reality the controls were to consist of
animals allowed to live out their normal life-spans (which he conve-
niently overlooked), as well as the very procedures he objected to.
Several paragraphs of the pink sheets were deleted. Perhaps they con-
tained more vitriol than even the VA thought was suitable for me. An-
other revealing criticism was left in, however. Since Andy had been part
of my lab, the reviewer felt that I "would exert considerable influence on
the character of the research proposed here," and for him that was an
unacceptable contamination.
The denouement was completely predictable. All the proposals were
rejected. We continued to work through 1980, supported at a low level
of productivity by the interim funds. I kept a small part of the tissue
culture lab going with a little money from the company that had made
the black boxes for our bone-healing stimulators. In it we did a scaled-
down version of Andy's proposed experiment to test for stimulation of
malignant cells from electrical osteogenesis—and found it.
From January through June of that year, most of our energy went into
drafting one last proposal and trying to get a fair hearing from someone
else in the VA. This time we stipulated right in the proposal that I
would officially retire and that Dave Murray would become the lab's
principal
investigator.
Of
course,
the research
director
knew
that
I