fat or dirt from the rubber tubing but simply to oxidation.
Meyerhof made a fine impression upon me. He is very serious and a hard
worker, with strong and honest beliefs, and I think he is an ideal type of
scientist, although I have heard considerable adverse criticism of his
scientific attitude since I left Berlin. Meyerhof thought they should have
called Professor Magnus from Utrecht to Berlin as successor to Rubner. He
thought Durig was not a great man. But as I recall it, Rubner thinks they
need, first, a teacher, and everybody says that Durig is a wonderful lecturer.
Meyerhof also thought they should have chosen Warburg as Rubner’s successor.
Meyerhof says that a lot of people almost discovered insulin. Thus,
Minkowski and Zuelzer almost discovered it. They got a depression of blood
sugar but convulsions, and did not know it was due to low blood sugar. They
were scared, since they thought it was a foreign protein such as trypsin and
that the individuals were sensitized to it. They all stopped their work at
this point, but Banting followed it up. He said that the Banting-Macleod
controversy was very bad and that at the Nobel prize lecture there was quite
a mix up, each avoiding mixing with the other if he could help it.
Meyerhof is a most intelligent fellow. He admires A. V. Hill greatly.
Apparently the two are very thick. He says that Hill's alveolar air tests
are O.K. He wonders why Lusk is so dogmatic. It is a pity that I did not
have time to go into A. V. Hill’s ideas with him in London. As a matter of
fact, when I was there later, it was impossible to see Hill long enough.
I wonder whether the labile CO2 is sufficiently "blown off" to give a real
respiratory quotient, even with the fore and after periods that Hill uses.
Krogh and Lindhard with most of their work went only to 1500 c.c. of oxygen.
Hill, of course, goes enormously higher (nearly 6 liters of Og)* How do
these two things agree? Meyerhof states that the gamma glucose of Lunds-
gaard, Winter, and Smith is skeptical. He says the work of Winter and Smith