en what my
colleagues expected from their pupils and what I did was the difference
between the lightning bug and the lightning. Those students! They didn't
want biochemistry; they want a letter on a card; a "C" would do. Damn
few of them got it from me, I'm happy to say, and those that did, knew
more about the subject than most PhD's.

Now, I take as my creed the fruitful dictum: Think in other categories.
A famous researcher once invented--or discovered--this maxim in a dream.
It is the secret of many great advances in science. Get off the main
line. Stop fooling with the leaves of the tree, and turn to the roots.
Invert the problem, if necessary.

I was thinking about the narcotics scandal. A teacher at my college had
a lovely sixteen-year-old daughter, carefully reared, who was badly
hooked. I saw that poor man's hair whiten in a few months. How would you
feel, knowing that your daughter had been so degraded by a drug as to
sell herself to anybody with enough money to buy her a fix? An innocent,
playful sniff at a party, and some punk, probably an addict himself, had
trapped her in order to finance his own habit. They talk about cures,
but people on the inside know that permanent escape from the trap is as
rare as portraits of Trotsky in Russia. Or integrity among politicians
in this country.

Well, I put my brains to work on the problem. It seemed obvious that, as
in the case of Prohibition, you couldn't possibly lick the drug traffic
by cutting the lines of supply. Not in a country as big as ours, with
the Mexican border and Red China on the side of the enemy. Not when a
package the size of a watch could be worth a fortune.

Think in other categories, I reminded myself. How can a biochemist,
rather than a policeman, stop the Syndicate? Then it came to me, simple
and obvious. Hit the source, the weak link, the roots of the poison
tree. In short, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy itself.

Basic, isn't it? Destroy the plant, and you cut the heart out of the
drug traffic. No cops; no hopeless warfare against cunning smugglers; no
battle with big-money corruption of officials. And remember: no chemist
alive can synthesize opium or its derivatives. Sure, there are a few
other bad narcotic drugs from different plants, like marijuana, but they
play a relatively small part, and can be controlled. Besides, it was my
intention to destroy their sources as well, when the time came. But
first the biggest culprit.