OCR Text |
Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Too Little for Brains' Idea Is Hindering Research Medicine By BILLY ROSE Today, I'd like to tell you about a talk I had with a doctor who is doing research work at one of the New York cancer clinics. He made me promise not to use his name because he was afraid he might be blacklisted by the foundation which pays his salary. I began by asking him to sketch in his pre-research career. "The usual 10-year grind," he said. "Four years of college, four more at medical school, a year as intern, and a year In residency training." train-ing." "What made you go into1 research?" "Like a lot of young doctors," he r said, "I couldn't get used to sitting by while a patient died simply because I didn't know anything any-thing else I could do for him. Every time I looked up into the eyes of relatives gathered around the bed of a man In the last stages of cancer, I told myself that my job wasn't to Billy Rose go on using the hit-or-misi techniques tech-niques but to get into a laboratory and help find the real cure." "How did you go about getting started?" "I made the usual applications," said the M.D., "but I soon found the hospitals and universities had no funds to hire research men, and that I couldn't get a job unless a foundation paid my salary. To complicate things, most foundations won't give you a fellowship unless you first have a job. In addition. It's almost impossible to get a grant until you've published a certain cer-tain number of scientific papers and, of course, you can't publish such papers until you've worked in a laboratory and had a chance to do research worth writing about. 'It finally boiled down to this I could work for nothing In a cancer can-cer laboratory, or I could take a job paying $120 a week doing research for a cosmetic outfit. Well, I had Just gotten married and was ready to settle for the money, but my wife wouldn't hear of It she went out and got an office job and made me stick to my test tubes." "HOW LONG did you work for free?" "About a year," said the doctor, "and then the head of the medical center a very decent guy squeezed me onto the payroll at $28.87 a week." "You could have earned more washing dishes." "We managed to get by," said the medico, "but the following year my wife bad a baby and bad to quit her job. Alter that, it was pretty rugged. As, lor instance, i we couldn't afford to buy a crib, and the youngster had to sleep in a donated baby carriage, "Somehow, though, we pulled our way through, and by the end of the following year I had gotten a couple of research pieces published. With these to back me up, I applied for a fellowship paying $3,000 a year." "Minus withholding tax, I presume." pre-sume." "It may not sound like much, but I felt like John D., Jr. when the grant came through," said the doctor. "Last year, I went through the application rigmarole again 275 typed pages and this time I got the full $3,600. "WHAT DO YOU DO to earn all that money?" I said. "I'm In charge of three cancer projects and help on half a dozen others. On the side, I run a throat clinic, work in the wards and give seminars." "Any chance of a raise?" "I'm afraid not," said the doctor, "and, as far as fellowships are concerned, con-cerned, I'm getting near the end of the line. I'm 29 now, and the foundations founda-tions don't like to make grants to men over 30." "There's always the job in the industrial lab." I said. "It may come to that," said the M. D., "but I hope not. Na matter mat-ter what it pays, I want to keep plugging away on cancer. It seems a lot more important than de- . veloping a new shade of face powder . . ." The day after our talk, I happened hap-pened to pass the medical skyscraper sky-scraper in which the young doctor works, and I noticed that an additional addi-tional wing was under construction. Dozens of steel workers, bricklayers bricklay-ers and carpenters all averaging around a hundred a week were getting in each other's way. Over the half-finished entrance was a space which looked as if it might eventually be filled with a block of marble on which a fitting inscription would be carved. "I know what it ought to be," I said to myself. " 'Too much for bricks, too little for brains.' " |