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     42                                       THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

 

if called upon to do so, to produce scientific evidences concerning their nature and composition.* Above all, do not for a moment imagine that you ‘have tried trypsin in cancer, and have found it useless,’ when to all intents and purposes you might just as well have been testing the effects of a solution of glycerine and water. Do not think it is ‘science’ to perform mere elementary qualita­tive experiments upon your injections, showing that they have some action upon starch and upon white of egg. Lastly, under the erroneous idea that it thereby makes the thing a scientific document, do not publish any account of your negative experiments with trypsin and amylopsin with the sub-title, ‘A Scientific Report,’ unless the docu­ment in question fulfil, like my scientific memoirs and like this book, in all respects the requirements of science.”

The greatest exaction of science is truth. This is why the expression, “scientific truth,” is so far-reaching and invincible. In the opening passages of this Introduction two points were referred to, and to them at its close I return. There is,” said Tyndall, in somewhat different words, “ in the true scientific man a desire far greater than to have his conclusions ‘ generally accepted ‘: it is the ardent wish to see them verified in fact.” Again, it was pointed out that the problems of the origin, nature, etc., of cancer formed but a special case, a side-issue, of the application of a general principle. This general principle, revealed by my researches of more than twenty years, was of an antithetic alternation of generations with a continuity of germ-cells from generation to generation as the basis of the cycle of life. This, the law of animal development, was what during many years of research Carl Ernst von Baer groped for, but in vain. In this

 

 

*  Apparently this rule of science has no applications in official cancer research.

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