AMERICA TO LEAD WORLD IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

"America will lead the world in science", said Professor William Einthoven of the University of Leyden, Holland, to a CRIMSON reporter recently. Professor Einthoven is one of the leading physiologists of the world. He came to this country two weeks ago for the purpose of delivering the E. K. Dunham course of lectures at the Medical School.

Professor Einthoven expressed himself as much impressed with the excellent and hard work that is being done in the laboratories of Boston. "You not only have the money but you have the men and their wonderful enthusiasm," he said.

He has already delivered two lectures at the Medical School. His topic was in both cases "The Relation of the Mechanical and Electrical Phenomena of Muscular Contraction With Special Reference to Cardiac Muscle".

Body Serves As Generator

Professor Einthoven's work has been concerned principally with two topics, the application of electricity to the human body, and the study of the electric currents developed by the body.

"Physiology", he said, "is a study of the nerves, muscles, and the heart. The heart in contracting develops electric currents. Every muscle in contracting generates electricity. Of course the amperage is minute, the average magnitude being about one ten-millionth part of an ampere. You can imagine the sensitivity required of any instrument to measure this infinitesimal electric current."

Measured Minute Electric Current

Professor Einthoven's greatest contribution to science has been the invention of an instrument which enables a photographic record to be made of an electric current as minute as that generated by the heart. He accomplished this by the discovery of the wire galvanometer. This consists of a thin wire, stretched in a magnetic field. By virtue of its ability to measure these feeble electric currents of the heart it has proved a tremendous boon to the study of heart disease. So important is it for this purpose that almost every hospital in the country which takes heart patients is equipped to make electrocardiographs, as the pictures of the heart's action are called.

Professor Einthoven denied the report that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for research in physiology, declaring that he had had no official notification of any such honor.