The Microscope (Reductionist) or the Telescope (Holistic)?

Abstract

I think most of you here tonight know speakers quite well. I know one of them extremely well, the other not quite so well. When this debate was set up the organizers did not know that our two speakers have known each other for 20 years and have been on opposite sides of the fence, although both have revised their points of view somewhat in the ensuing years. C. Ladd Prosser is from the University of Illinois where he first went in 1939. He was away from Illinois for 4 years during the war, when he worked as a radiation biologist and during that period he met George Sacher: he continued to have significant interaction with him over all the ensuing years. Dr. Prosser is a self-described generalist with over 50 years involvement in physiology and he describes himself as trying to alter the trend toward increasing specialization, which he feels is terribly narrowing in its effects on biology. Our speakers first met when Ron Hart was a student in Howard Ducoff’s lab and took Dr. Prosser’s comparative physiology course. Both of them want to tell me stories from those days about an encounter that took place in the elevator. Maybe Dr. Hart will finish that story for us.