Remarks made on acceptance of the Proctor Medal award, June 27, 1961.

should like to express my deep gratitude to the Proctor Medal Committee for making me the recipient of the Proctor Medal for the year 1965. I consider it a great honor, and I am particularly gratified because I receive it being not an ophthalmologist, but a biochemist who was carrying on basic research in biochemistry using the eye as a model for certain properties of living systems which were of interest to me as a biochemist. The basic scientist who works only in his laboratory is in a somewhat privileged position inasmuch as the work that he is doing primarily satisfies his curiosity and investigative instincts and thus at the outset impractical endeavor is a source of profound intellectual pleasure. I believe, therefore, that it is a kind of reward in itself when he finds that those of his colleagues in the scientific community, who are by their profession much closer to practical situations in which the necessity arises to help people, find the results of his investigations interesting and useful to them as theoretical basis in their pursuits. It is customary in acknowledging a scientific award of such high standing as the Proctor Medal to pay tribute to the teachers of the recipient who introduced him into the field of his scientific endeavor. I am in a somewhat embarrassing situation in this regard as I must consider myself essentially an autodidact in biochemistry. I received my stimulation in my investigations, apart from the reading of scientific literature, from occasional conversations with my colleagues in the department at which I was working and on visits to scientific laboratories in various parts of the world. But I believe that I owe a debt of gratitude to a certain number of scientists who during my career helped me greatly by providing me with opportunities and facilities for carrying on my research. First of all, I must acknowledge my debt to the late Professor Otto von Furth who gave me the opportunity of starting my scientific work in his laboratory in 1924, although I spent only a very short time in collaboration with him, and after that immediately started as an independent investigator. Furth had the gift of recognizing the capacity for successful scientific work in young people and giving them unlimited opportunities for successful efforts without any direct advantage to himself. He also stimulated the scientific imagination of those who worked in his laboratory by benevolent but sharp criticism. After I left Vienna and had to find a new place to continue my investigations, I was greatly helped during the first two years of my sojourn in Paris by Dr. Andre Tsanck who was the Director of the Institut de la Transfusion Sanguine a 1'Hopital St. Antoine in Paris and who, after the outbreak of the Second World War, when I was no longer able to support myself, took care of providing me with an adequate means of livelihood. Later, in Marseille, it was Professor Jean Roche who was the Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the Medical School of the University of Marseille, and is at present Rector of the University of Paris who, on the basis of a recommendation by Otto Meyerhof, helped me greatly in my inves-