MacDougal had been right all the time. Lyons was a crackpot with a plausible line of chatter, enough of a technique at micro dissection to compel respect, and a real and commendable eagerness to explore his idea right down to the bottom. MacDougal was a frozen brained old man with far too much reverence for his teacher, a man far too ready to say that, a respected notion was right because it was respected, and a man who had performed no actual experiments himself since his student days. But he had been right purely intuitively in predicting that Lyons' inversion of Lansing's Law would come to nothing. I gather that victory in the sciences doesn't always go to the most personable man, any more than it does in any other field. I'm glad to know it; I'm always glad to find some small area of human endeavor which resists the conman and the sales talk.

When Pfitzner discovered ascomycin, we had HWS close Pearl River out entirely.

Negative results of this kind are valuable for scientists too, I'm told. How you will evaluate your proposed research method id the light of these two experiences is unknown to me; I can only tell you what I think I learned. I am convinced that we must be much slower, in the future, to ignore the fringe notion and the marginal theorist. One of the virtues of these crackpots, if that is what they are, is that they tend to cling to ideas which can be tested. That's worth hanging on to, in a world where scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can't suggest ways to test them. Whoever Locke was, I suppose he hadn't put a thousandth as much time into thinking about gravity as Blackett had; yet Blackett couldn't suggest a way to test his equation, whereas the Locke Derivation was testable (on Jupiter) and turned out to be right. As for Lyons, his notion was wrong; but it too fell down because it failed the operational test, the very test it proposed to pass; until we performed that test, we had no real 'assessment of Lansing's Law, which had been traveling for years on prestige because of the "impossibility" of weighing any contrary hypothesis. Lyons forced us to do that, and enlarged our knowledge.