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makes the thing a scientific document, do not publish any account of your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.