MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 7 November 1925, Page 12

MARTYRS TO SCIENCE.

A NEVER GROWING LIST.

• ;) SPLENDID STORY OF SACRIFICE

Tlie tragic death of Professor Max-wcll-Lcfroy while experimenting with a new poison gas for the eradication of insect pests is yet another of the sacrifices made by research workers in the cause of man’s progress. It is in medical research that tlm greatest risks confront scientists. The story of such victims of their own splendid 'curiosity is an inspiring one. It begins with their cheerful abnegation of the prizes of their profession. They turn aside the temptation to win the great incomes of specialists, and accept instead the poor pittances that are in most eases the portion of the research students. It ends, in too many cases, with death stalking its victims, who arc equipped by their own science, not with the power to ward it off, but with the knowledge of every step they have to take on the road to extinction. Sometimes the process is a long one, as in the case of many of the early workers in X-rays, who acquired cancer in their efforts for humanity.

It was a short time ago that Dr. Dutton, a distinguished worker in tropical diseases, specialising in sleeping sickness and relapsing fever, contracted the latter complaint and died. Not two years ago a brilliant scientist, Bacod, paid with his life the penalty of seeking to know the cause of typhus. He and a companion, Dr. Arkwright, both of them over 50, and therefore of an age that rarely recovers from typhus, took part in an investigation which ended with both of them taking the disease. Bacod died, but Arkwright recovered. Many will recall the death in 1900 of Dr. Lazear, one of the Commission on Yellow Fever sept to Havana by the American Government. Dr. Lazear allowed himself to be inoculated with the bite of a mosquito, in order to observe the progress in himself of the disease he was studying. He died, as did also Dr. Myers, of the Liverpool Commission, inquiring into the same‘disease. These men’s attitude towards their work is not that of fanatics. They are possessed by a burning enthusiasm for their -work. They carry it as far as they can by experimentation on animals; the time sometimes comes when the progress of a complaint must be watched in a human subject. With ?, full knowledge of the risks, and a knowledge, too, in many cases, of'the cure, they experiment on themselves. That many of them do not die, but live to benefit wretched fellow-creatures, makes them none the less heroes than the ones who die. The sum of human woe would be far greater were it not for these sacrificed lives.

Not all dangerous research is medical. Young Ivelth Lucas, a brilliant mechanical genius, perished in the early years of the war, in an endeavour to prove one of his theories of flight. To many of these! men the spirit of adventure calls to risk their lives; with many more, the choice of a dangerous piece of research is made with no heroics, with no sense of daring, but as part of a job they have soberly taken on, and nobly carried through.