Word: conklin
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Says Historian Conklin: "I once heard a distinguished physiologist say that there are two ways to gain recognition, either brag or fight. It seems to me that Schleiden did both...
There is no malice in this. It is just Dr. Conklin's tart way of speaking. He regards science as a vast cooperative enterprise in which it is difficult to find the real beginning of anything, and he is sure that too many textbooks attach personal labels to epochal discoveries. No one has the faintest idea who invented the wheel, the pulley, the boat, the sail. And who really invented those later marvels, the friction match, the barometer, the airplane, the steamboat...
Nature of the Man. Among great modern scientists Edwin Grant Conklin stands out by being oldfashioned. He began his academic career as a country schoolteacher, dispensing all knowledge in the rural scholastic grab bag and performing as janitor to boot. Born during the Civil War in Waldo, Ohio, son of a country doctor, he almost entered the Methodist ministry but plumped for science instead. Ohio Wesleyan gave him his A.B. and A.M., Johns Hopkins his Ph.D. After teaching biology for 20 years at Ohio Wesleyan and elsewhere, he was summoned to Princeton...
...wonder of life never paled for Professor Conklin. When he taught undergraduates and flashed images of microscopic plants and animals on a stereopticon screen, Conklin himself looked at them with open-mouthed awe. At the close of their senior year he always advised his students to get married the day after graduation. From 1908, he stayed at Princeton, ripening not only in years, but-as many other old-fashioned teachers do not-in wisdom and prestige...
...Conklin is primarily an embryologist, whose chief scientific work was done with such material as the eggs of the sea squirt and of a little mollusc named Crepidula. But he got his start in science before extreme specialization was as fashionable as it is today. So he is something of a jack-of-all-biology. Perhaps for the same reason he has the kind of extra-level head which men who are not specialists sometimes have. No dodo, despite his amiable nature, he has a merry tongue which articulates scientific problems with what the contemporaries of his younger days called...