Here follows a reproduction of the plan just referred to, with
_fac-simile_ of the signatures of the distinguished physiologists
who approved the plan and consented to serve as “Assessors.” To this
list should have been added the name of Professor Ozawa, professor of
physiology at the University of Tokio, Japan; but time and distance
did not permit gaining the required understanding and assent.
Professor Ozawa’s connection with the inquiry would make it not only
international but interhemispherical and interracial as well, and this
possibility of scientific coördination and coöperation is typical of
the harmonising wave that is fast enveloping the earth for the benefit
of mankind.
I give a copy of the document entire, with estimates of cost,
etc., just as it was originally drawn and intended only as a trial
suggestion, to be modified by circumstances.—HORACE FLETCHER.]
PROPOSAL TO FOUND AN INTERNATIONAL LABORATORY OF RESEARCH FOR THE
STUDY OF NUTRITION IN ALL ITS ASPECTS
Notwithstanding the enormous development which the study of
Experimental Physiology has undergone during the last half-century, and
the constant multiplication of physiological laboratories fitted in
a manner which enables them to be used as places of research as well
as of instruction in the methods of physiological inquiry, it has
appeared to many physiologists that a great need remains to be supplied
by the establishment of an International Laboratory of Research,
devoted primarily, if not exclusively, to the investigation of problems
connected with the Nutrition of the Animal, and particularly of Human
Organisms,--studies particularly, and in the first instance, from the
point of view of the relation of the food consumed by the animal body
to its output of energy, either in the form of heat or mechanical work.
The reason for establishing such a laboratory, available for the use
of investigations of all nations, is to be found in the fact that the
researches which are now called for, in order to place upon a firm
foundation our knowledge of food and its relations to the activity of
the organism, necessitates an assemblage of apparatus and machinery
so specialised and so costly that they are not to be found collected
together even in the best equipped of the physiological laboratories
of Europe or America, which all subserve in the first instance the
purposes of systematic instruction. Undoubtedly, unquestionably,
certain of the great and costly appliances of research are to be found
in particular laboratories, as, for instance, in those of Berlin,
Munich, Paris, and Turin, but there certainly exists no laboratory
in which the investigator can find assembled under one roof all
the specially fitted chemical, physical, and even bacteriological
appliances which he may need to employ in the investigation of the
Phenomena of Nutrition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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