Three
The Sign of the
Miracle
Real science is creative, as much so as painting, sculpture, or writing.
Beauty, variously defined, is the criterion for art, and likewise a good
theory has the elegance, proportion, and simplicity that we find beau-
tiful. Just as the skilled artist omits the extraneous and directs our atten-
tion to a unifying concept, so the scientist strives to find a relatively
simple order underlying the apparent chaos of perception. Perhaps be-
cause it was mine, my theory that the current of injury stimulated re-
generation seemed both simple and beautiful. It's impossible to convey
the sense of excitement I felt when all of the facts fell together and the
idea came. I'd created something new that explained the previously inex-
plicable. I couldn't wait to see if I was right.
In all the time that the Bernstein hypothesis had been used to explain
away the current of injury, no one had ever thought to measure the
current over a period of days to see how long it lasted. If it was only ions
leaking from damaged cells, it should disappear in a day or two, when
these cells had finished dying or repairing themselves. This simple mea-
surement, with a comparison of the currents in regenerating versus non-
regenerating limbs, was what I planned to do. I would uniformly
amputate the forelegs of frogs and salamanders. Then, as the frogs'
stumps healed over and the salamanders' legs redrew, I would measure
the currents of injury each day.
The experiment itself was as simple as could be. The tricky part was
getting peremission to do it.