Word: squirts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...main reason I'm not running is simply because I've only had a four-year crack at this Chronicle job from topside, and being a fathead I think I need a couple of more years anyhow. The dope is I'm sort of a squirt, a very egotistical one-so egotistical that I think I'm smart enough to know I haven't done the job with a newspaper yet. Maybe I'll wait and run for President...
Saga. A self-styled "little squirt anxious to be a tough guy," Paul Smith skipped through high school in Pescadero, Calif., at 14 set out to rub against the world. He jumped a harvest train, spent some time in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, rode freight trains east to Ontario for gold, found none, jumped another freight back, worked in British Columbia logging camps (where friendly lumberjacks organized a bodyguard to protect him from those who resented his slickness), prospected in the Mojave Desert (where all he got was sunstroke), shoveled coal in Utah and Pennsylvania, bummed. Once, arriving...
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...
Early in the 20th Century, peering through his microscope at the eggs of little marine animals called sea squirts (a diagram of a sea squirt egg appears beside him on TIME'S cover), Dr. Conklin upset this notion. He found differentiated tissue regions which later gave rise to the outer skin, the middle skin, the inner skin and the main trunk of the nervous system-carried the origin of organs all the wayback...
Conklin proved his point by putting sea squirt embryos into centrifuges (whirling machines) and literally turning them inside out. Result: he developed embryo sea squirts with eyes in their innards and spinal cords outside their skins...