The Sign of the Miracle
69
When you want to do a research project, there are certain channels
you must go through to get the money. You write a project proposal,
spelling out what hypothesis you want to test, why you think it should
be done, and how you plan to go about it. The proposal goes to a
committee supposedly composed of your peers, people who have demon-
strated competence in related research. If they approve your project and
the money is available, you generally get part of what you asked for,
enough to get started.
The Veterans Administration had been dispensing research money for
several years as a sort of bribe to attract doctors despite the low pay in
government service. The money from Washington was doled out by the
most influential doctors on the staff, not necessarily the best researchers,
but I still felt I had a good chance because the VA was having an espe-
cially hard time recruiting orthopedists. Moreover, my hypothesis was
based on the work of Rose, Polezhaev, Singer, Sinyukhin, and Zhir-
munskii with inescapable logic. And since frogs and salamanders were
anatomically similar, any difference in their currents of injury should
reflect the disparity in their powers of regeneration. My chances of being
thrown off by extraneous factors were thus minimal.
I remember thinking, as I wrote the proposal, how my life had come
full circle. As a college freshman in 1941, I'd conducted a crude experi-
ment on salamanders, showing that thyroid stimulation by iodine didn't
speed up regeneration. Here I was nearly twenty years later, beneficiary
of the intervening research, hoping to add to our knowledge of the same
phenomenon and perhaps even discover something that would help hu-
man patients. I worried that my roundabout course might weigh against
me, since one of the criteria for grants was whether the investigator had
been trained for that particular field. This proposal would have been
expected from a physiologist, not an orthopedist. Nevertheless, I was
asking for a relatively minuscule amount of money. I needed only a
thousand dollars to put together the equipment, so I didn't anticipate
much trouble.
The Tribunal
"Dr. Becker, could you please come to a special research committee
meeting in one hour?" The committee's secretary was calling. I'd known
something was up, two months had passed since I'd filed my proposal,
and all my queries as to its fate had gone unanswered.
"I'll be there."