THE BEST news comes invariably, infallibly, indubitably from the sciences.
Nothing else comes close. The suspense is greater than an early Eric Ambler
whodunit, the plots are thicker than the folds on Goldfinger’s neck, and the
principal characters are on a par with Sherlock Holmes when it comes to
deductions. And whether or not you invest in the right start-up biochemicals
company, there is still a payoff for us all.

There is also some virtual gore in science, to appeal to the fringe element
for whom the high point in a soccer match is the red card rather than a
deftly-chipped goal. Historians will eventually disentangle for us who really
found HIV, and why the American and Frenchman came to a settlement of sorts.
Ernst Chain must have smarted a long time from the knowledge that he did not
discover the effects of penicillin himself, because he still attacked Alexander
Fleming viciously long after the Scotsman’s death.

With all its elements to capture, to fascinate, surprise, astound, lure and
intrigue, why is it that science is so helpless when it comes to attracting the
best youngsters and wads of money? A lot of answers to that all come cascading
down from the fact that parents and the public still do not know enough about
the job. The unease and awe of nonscientists is immediately apparent if you ask
them what they think might be the prerequisites of a scientific career. They are
likely to suppose that to succeed in science you need the short-hand logic
distilled in mathematics, and that if you have an artist’s eye, you are
emotional and therefore biased, and have no chance of hacking it.

Wrong on both counts. The most important requirement is what used to be
called lateral thinking, that is to say the use of the Holmesian modus
operandi—to be able to extrapolate to the job at hand from whatever
knowledge you carry around. This requires the knack of dragging notions across
interdisciplinary boundaries, unfazed by supercilious stares from the pundits.
The process is unconscious and might draw on a knowledge of celestial mechanics
when thinking about biology, for instance, or on a sense of beauty and symmetry
when considering combinatorial chemistry.

It now appears that intuition can be learned—paradoxical though it
sounds. Antonio Damasio and his colleagues, working at the Salk Institute in
California and the University of Iowa, showed that humans are very quick to get
hunches, long before they assess the risk of a decision consciously (
Science, vol 275, p 1293). The Salk team has identified the parts of the
brain where such thinking is done—the ventromedial frontal cortices, to be
precise.

So we succeed in the sciences if we can pull similes and analogies from the
unlit corners of our minds. The extraction process is unconscious and
“anticipatory” say the authors. What is then stacked away depends on previous
experience; and these experiences are retained better if they are coupled to
emotions. Ergo, experience and emotions foster lateral thinking. But humans
rarely act on these insights. We have the attention span of a chicken pecking
away while going down the plucking belt. Our kids are so distracted at school
that they are hit with psychotropic medication for “attention deficit
ťĺžą˛ő´Ç°ůťĺąđ°ů”.

The media suffer from the same affliction. Certainly here in North America we
should take our daily press to task for its poor follow-up on the research that
led to the cloning of Dolly the sheep and the bioethical issues it raised. A
little lateral thinking might have led the papers to set out the fabulous
sequence of discoveries that started in 1953 with James Watson and Francis
Crick’s moment of intuition: and explain how they came to it from a sense of
aesthetics, playing with cardboard cutouts of purines and pyrimidines.

So, let your mind ramble a little. Your bizarre idea might just add
something to the endeavour that invariably brings the best news.

To fall in love is to fall beyond help. Those struck by Cupid’s arrow are
beyond reason. They quiver for a glimpse of, or a word from, their beloved and
pray that they can arouse the same strange feelings in them.

And if your physique is in need of some improvement, your financial security
precarious and your social graces not all they might be, you will be hoping for
a miracle—or perhaps a love potion. Something that will inspire, with a
single swig, blind love in the person for whom you are afire. But reliable
practitioners of the ancient black arts are hard to find in the average shopping
mall. Those few dubious concoctions that have survived almost into the 21st
century carry obligatory disclaimers, leading to the obvious conclusion that
they don’t work.

Science will surely hold the answer? The idea of pheromones, the chemically
defined sexual attractants of the animal world, come to mind. For some species,
yes. But sadly, they have not evolved to the kind of sophisticated purpose that
we require. Insects seem to have derived an evolutionary advantage from
pheromones, but such substances cause them to engage in indiscriminate
copulation, sometimes en masse. Perhaps science should be prevented from
discovering a human equivalent. Suppose, for instance, after a visit to the
pharmacist, you accidentally smashed the bottle while struggling for a seat on
the crowded 6.15 to the suburbs . . .

No, we are not dumb animals, mere slavering victims of reproductive
necessity, even if we can be the hapless slaves of our emotions. Males are said
to fall for beauty, while females can be swayed by a sense of humour, intellect
and piles of money. Gone are antiquated biological reasons in choice of mate.
For the modern Western male, a wide pelvis for giving birth is not high on the
list of desired attributes in a prospective partner, while women have become
providers for themselves, and are probably happy no longer being forced to
shackle themselves to dull men just for their money.

The problem with the love potions of old or human pheromones is that they are
nonspecific. The object of your affections could sip the doctored wine during a
romantic evening out—and leave with the waiter or waitress. Rather, we are
looking for something that not only stimulates affection, but also points it in
your direction.

I suspect that the answer to this problem may have been around for a while.
Way back in 1976, researchers at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute in New
York observed that mice preferred to mate with females that had a different set
of one type of the recognition proteins of the immune system, the so-called
major histocompatibility complex (MHC). These proteins are present in nearly all
cells; they characterise the individual, recognise transplants or invading
microorganisms as foreign, and mobilise the immune defences against them. The
male mice in the study were literally able to sniff out some expression of the
distinguishing MHC markers in the females and chose their sexual partners
accordingly.

Immunology might seem rather dull and unrelated to sexual attraction. But the
immune system, which spends its life attempting to define the “self”, is
perfectly placed to pass on personal information to potential mates.

Humans are no exception, it seems. Claus Wedekind and colleagues at the
University of Bern asked female students to smell unwashed T-shirts of men
unknown to them and rate them for “pleasantness” (New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,
Science, 6 May 1995, p 19). State-of-the-art serologic typing revealed the
MHC genotype of all subjects. They conducted their investigations under
scrupulously sound control conditions and cautiously eliminated anything that
might falsify the score. The results, confirmed statistically, show that male
body odours were considered more pleasant by women with a dissimilar set of
MHCs.

The really intriguing result was that if the women were on the Pill, they
preferred the smell of men with a similar set of MHCs. Fascinating conclusions
spring to mind which Wedekind and colleagues seemed studiously to avoid. The
difference in preferences of women taking the Pill shows that hormones can
influence the choice of a mate. Is, then, a couple’s life perturbed when she
goes on or comes off the Pill, or becomes pregnant?

And more importantly for our romantic quest, could a hormone cocktail be used
to manipulate sexual attraction very specifically? Could the fiendish suitor or
suitoress who does not get the desired romantic response spike the drink of the
intended with steroids on the sly, and ensure that instant love ensues?

Those gripped by dementia cupiditatis who wish to dabble in such
dangerous speculations should look first at Sexual Pharmacology by
Theresa Cranshaw and James Goldberg (W. W. Norton, 1996). If your results prove
alarmingly successful, there are some cooling off recipes as well.

We have devised lots of methods to chisel data indelibly into the brain. You can read a text onto an endless audio tape, for example, and have it played back at you, like a mantra, while you sleep. Generations of students tried that and went into the exams as highly strung neurotics with a perfect memory for noise. In the 1950s, one wagered on advances in pharmaceuticals and swallowed ephedrine derivatives, and later even glutamic acid. My grandmother ingested pure lecithin, the “nerve substance”, by the shovelful; her eclectic taste depleted the estate and brought her to eye the family’s assorted medical talent with increasing suspicion. Nothing came of these chemical fads. The rage in memory research in the 1960s centred round cannibal worms (Planaria) which could go through a maze at their first attempt and as fast as their highly trained progenitors, which a clever psychologist had fed them in small pieces. Fortunately, the idea did not catch on for humans.

Tricks to improve the memory inevitably disappoint since our expectations tend to be too high. We want a selective memory; what we have is a memory for the good and the bad, the useful and the trivial. We want instant access, but recall depends on factors beyond our control: at times we succeed in pulling memory contents out of a deep abyss, actively by association, or passively under hypnosis. We want high resolution but even our best memories are vague, centre on the principal item and cannot be scanned for detail. So we whine and wish we had the aptitudes of bygone days, when our schoolteachers bullied us into learning by heart and reciting some works because they rhyme, and others because they don’t. The choice was at their discretion, so miraculously most of us learnt the stuff without interest or the benefit of context – the two most important factors for success in memorising anything.

Adult life does not require much learning by rote. Real exam situations are rare once you’ve been through the assorted levels of schooling, except when you want to get a pilot’s licence, qualify as a diver, or graduate from Monsieur Grosporc’s École de Nouvelle Cuisine. You put yourself into these predicaments, so you evidently have the interest to help you commit every trifling detail to memory. I once met a man in Bavaria who had an encyclopedic knowledge of Beethoven’s orchestral works – he had arranged them all for small mandolin ensembles. You’ve got it made if you are interested in what you do for a living. The increased knowledge that accrues from even a temporary interest, for instance when you are new on the job, sustains the interest again, focuses attention and extends the concentration span, and these circles do work in your favour.

Interests, motivations and emotions condition the memory process. Their subjective touch is added through the so-called limbic system deep in the centre of the brain. Storing and recalling an event is easier if there is a moment of love or hate associated with it. Fifty years ago, some American soldiers learnt light conversational French with the incentive of heavy romancing. These days you could try telling your boss that it helps your work that you hate his guts. Adult life has the benefit of the prompt and the clue. We can put unobtrusive tracers on the items that we have to memorise. For example, lecturers should plan their sequence of slides not only for the continuity of their presentation but also as prompts for themselves. This is the second factor, the context through which astounding details are fished from the lower reaches of the memory. All tricks for improving the memory rely on the context of the event that has to be stored or retrieved. And the tricks can range from a banal alliteration to sparking a sophisticated train of logic: anything goes.

We lose much of the power of the brain if we consider ourselves too elegant to accept help through associations, for example, from mnemonics. The brain functions like that on its own all the time. Consider how the visual system works. The bible on the subject Principles of Neural Science (edited by E.R. Kandel at al., Appleton and Lange, Norwalk, 1991) discusses how a stimulus coming from the retina is processed in a string of centres in the brain, and each of its specific contributions. An object is first perceived in the visual cortex in the occiput, in its rough shape, looking much like the faces on television that are disguised by decomposing them into a raster of large pixels. Details about shape and colour are added in the hippocampus, a centre deep in the temporal lobe and part of the limbic system. The amygdala, a little knob in front of it, provides emotional qualities through its connections to the hypothalamus, plus input from other centres. The picture of the object is then reinforced in the thalamus and loops back to the visual cortex for storage in long-term memory.

We have a pretty good idea of the functional pathways in the visual system, since we can sever them in experimental animals, or observe the deficits resulting from traumatic lesions. The American neurophysiologists Mortimer Mishkin and Tim Appenzeller found that short-term memory is lost irretrievably when amygdala and hippocampus are destroyed, and that visual signals can no longer be linked to other sensory experiences (Scientific American, June 1987).

New stimuli cannot proceed into long-term memory, but old memory contents remain undisturbed. From our own experience, we accept as true that interest and context govern both our ability to memorise and to retrieve those memories. We have a delicious meal in front of us and good company opposite, and the various elements of the situation arouse desires, provoke incoherent thoughts, elicit double entendres, trigger the taste buds, raise old scenes from memory, and recharge the appropriate memory stores, and most of this because of a small knob of the limbic system called the amygdala and its thousands of connections.

Memory is fleeting, and it must be, not because the number of neurons is limited but because we have to bring old stores up-to-date constantly, using new connotations and new associations. The lessons are evident. We should use the plasticity of our memories to advantage and activate, when we learn, as many associative pathways as possible. If dancing helps, or reciting fortissimo, you delegate motor activity or sound to become prompts by which to summon memory contents when the need arises. And you don’t have to admit to what you are doing. Anything is permitted in love and in education.

The students are doing well. They go at the problems with enthusiasm, cheer
and a lot of spunk, even if we venerable professors think they do so without
the proper respect. We have to admit, though, that they assimilate the
material as required and find by themselves the objectives we had set for
them. In fact, they are able to work with their knowledge, and collate it
in combinations which freely cross the boundaries of the traditional
disciplines: all in all they perform well in what is called, in medical
education jargon, ‘integration’.

We professors are now tutors. We sit in on the discussions with the mandate
to head off wrong notions, put a bit of context into the developing stories,
and stop the girls and guys going off on tangents. This is hard work.
Patience never used to be a job requirement for a university professor. Yet
now we sit on our hands much of the time, keeping quiet while arguments
fester, no longer able to show how right we always are. It’s giving us
wrinkles.

This ‘problem-based learning’ is considered vastly superior to the old ways,
which inflicted knowledge by way of the pain of excruciating boredom.
Chances are that other universities will adopt a variant of it, as so many
medical schools in North America have done in the past few years. Be
prepared for the change. It will probably come unto you without warning, by
decree from the highest authorities.

The teachers of clinical disciplines had fewer qualms and concerns than we
lesser ilk of the basic sciences, since they had for years been using
problems, in the form of case reports. When we set out to formulate our
first set of problems, we came to realise how few references to the required
objectives can be packed into any one of them. It is still our prime concern
that there never seems to be enough problems to cover the subject matter,
although we have learnt to accept that some physicians might have quite a
fulfilling career if they remember only what goes on in the respiratory or
Krebs cycle, and never mind the subtleties.

The difficulty of formulating a problem is compounded by the idealistic
notion that the material ought not to be identified with a single
discipline. Problems that combine physiology with, say, immunology are
preferred. The physiologist and the immunologist will proclaim in unison
what a great idea this is, while adding that they cannot unfortunately come
up with a single problem that shows such self-denying devotion to the
cause. The students invariably and instantly recognise when a problem deals
with the concepts of, say, pathology: they open the right book and fall into
the appropriate argot.

The beginning of the first year of medical school is all basic sciences. As
our departments don’t have enough staff to allow the tutorials for
biochemistry to be given only by biochemists, for instance, we tutors have
become immensely cultivated and actually teach (although the term is frowned
upon) all 12 groups, of 8 or 9 students each, the physiology, pathology,
immunology, anatomy and cell biology, histology, pharmacology, biochemistry
and microbiology they need to know. We have to come to the rescue when the
students manage to manoeuvre themselves into a corner.

No small order that, for fellows like me who were trained in the olden days
in the Old Country. ‘That is not the way to run the programme,’ said a
consultant who was hired by the faculty and specialises in what they call
the psychology of the cognitive sciences. He claimed that tutors only needed
enough knowledge of the material to see that the procedure of the sessions
is respected. All responsibility concerning the material should rest with
the students.

We became a little irritated with this, since we felt that our know-how had
been shoved aside before there was any proof that the new method could do
better without us. Our obstreperous obstinacy was considered obstructionist,
but someone finally realised that it would not do to replace us all and
have medicine taught by proceduralists or, for that matter, by highly
trained psychologists.

So we are back to the true concerns. Problem-based learning has a lot going
for it. Most importantly, it fosters autonomy and self-reliance, essential
qualities for future physicians in view of the ever decreasing half-life of
knowledge in medicine. Our students attack problems with typical North
American nonchalance and complete them in the time given: they don’t become
sentimental over the beauty of a devilishly logical pathway. But most of
them don’t come to appreciate the contributions of the Grand Masters of our
profession either.

Our curriculum still has its flaws. Essential material not contained in the
short section on the basic sciences should be covered in clinical problems,
but this means that we fundamentalists must collaborate with the clinicians
to write them. Most of the time it does not work out this way because of
the enormous egos on either side. Ergo, some material is omitted, leaving in
its place only the pious hope that students will pick it up on their own.

A second point is that the new curriculum costs money. The faculty library
has to be stocked well enough to fulfil the programme’s aim of favouring all
aspects of autonomous study. As to examinations, it would be utter nonsense,
having sung the virtues of problem-oriented learning, to test students’
performance with multiple-choice questions. Not only are these far from any
kind of reality the students will encounter; putting them in a test would
seem wrong. So exams too must be constructed around problems, and the
unfortunate upshot is that our students’ performance is not comparable with
that of others working to a different curriculum. And then we accept only
students with the highest marks into our programme, and this introduces a
hefty bias. We do not have any statistically valid feedback on our
performance or on that of the students. Most of us feel good about the
programme, but it goes against the grain to say more because we have nothing
with which to document our opinion.

So you see, things are still hanging there, swinging in the arguments that
blow in from all directions. The claims of the new method to fostering
better understanding of complex relationships, improved long-term retention
of data, easier access to memory banks and so on, are probably all true. But
they cannot yet be verified. Our direct interaction with the students is
much more interesting and stimulating than the ancient magisterial method of
teaching. No more may we disregard the points that do not quite fit the
theory, or that are controversial, or that we just plain didn’t understand
ourselves. In the new game you have to be, as they say, on the qui vive at
all times.

Wolf Seufert is a professor of basic medical sciences at the University of
Sherbrooke Medical School, Sherbrooke, Quebec. Willie Stanton is a geologist
and amateur naturalist.

Title of proposed research

Anatomical exercises concerning the motion of the heart and blood.

Applicant

Guilielmus Harveius, BA (Cantab 1597), MD (Padua 1602).

Summary of proposed research

The applicant intends to perform a series of experiments on animals
to provide evidence for, and to confirm, some of the postulates concerning
the flow of blood and the function of the heart which he has publicised
in his position as Lumleian Lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians
since 1615, namely that, (1), the volume of blood which passes from the
veins to the arteries per unit time is too great to be produced from the
food consumed, (2), the volume of blood going into the extremities is far
in excess of their actual metabolic needs, and (3), arterial blood returns
to the heart from the extremities through the veins.

Dr Harvey will measure the volume of blood he claims is ejected by the
heart, per beat and per time. He also plans to study the emptying and subsequent
refilling of superficial blood vessels in the forearm and he hopes that
he will find a pattern such as to support his notion of the circulation
as a hydraulic system.

Experience and qualifications of applicant (pertinent to the project
submitted)

Dr H. is a distinguished anatomist, has been appointed the King’s Physician
in Ordinary and practises general medicine at St Bar-tholomew’s Hospital
in London. However, he has not received any formal training in physiology
and he is not known as an astute experimentalist.

The applicant bases his thesis exclusively on modern findings in descriptive
anatomy as presented by Andreas Vesalius, Realdo Colombo and Fabricius ab
Aquapendente of the University of Padua, his alma mater. He has not availed
himself as is customary of the privilege of attending lectures at other
European universities after graduation, and he might therefore not be wholly
familiar with accepted thought on the functions of the blood and the heart.

While qualified to supervise the work of surgeons at his hospital practice,
Dr H. does not himself appear to possess the manual skills which are required
to execute the experiments he plans to perform. The scatter of the preliminary
data submitted, for example, on the pulse rate and the cardiac output of
sheep, shows him as a rather careless experimenter without much concern
for statistical analysis.

Critical evaluation of proposed research

The applicant’s theory re the existence of a contiguous circulatory
system challenges the view, held by all physicians since Galen, that venous
blood is alimentary, produced in the liver from food absorbed in the intestines,
and endowed with the spirit of vitality through a connection with the arterial
system provided by pores in the walls which separate the heart’s three ventricles.
He claims never to have observed pores or holes in the heart, a statement
that is contradicted directly by my own vast professional experience: I
find a direct connection between one of the arteries and the principal vein
right above the heart in the majority of autopsy cases available for study,
mainly pre-term infants.

By contrast, I have never seen any evidence for the existence of blood
vessels providing a link between arteries and veins in the periphery of
the body, as is stipulated by the scheme of Dr H; such vessels would have
to be of an extremely fine calibre to escape the eye and would pose an insurmountable
mechanical resistance to the flow of blood. If, alternatively, arterial
blood were to soak the tissue directly, without being contained in blood
vessels, one should be able to extract a substantial volume of blood from
the isolated organ when squeezing it like a sponge. This is clearly not
the case.

Dr H. thus presents us with a circular argument: he opposes accepted
doctrine as invalid because he has not been able to see one of its essential
features. By contrast, he embraces a theory whose one essential feature
cannot be seen, namely the minuscule blood vessels in the periphery of the
circulation which supposedly form the connection between arteries and veins.

The applicant provides some experiments as indirect evidence for the
existence of a contiguous blood circulation scheme. Some superficial blood
vessels in the forearm fill from the side distal to the heart after they
were blocked temporarily by point pressure. This result cannot be accepted
as the desired proof, and I should ask the reader’s indulgence for mentioning
the parable of the three blind men describing an elephant. The fact that
a circulation loop might exist in the extremities cannot be used as an argument
in favour of the existence of such loops everywhere else in the organism.

Final assessment

The opinions expressed in the application are highly speculative. Critical
to the applicant’s theory is a presumed connection between the arterial
and venous sides in the periphery of the putative circulation. It is improbable
that the experimental work proposed will prove the existence of such a link.

Given the facts that the applicant has not had any postdoctoral training,
has practically no research experience and has no pub-lications by which
to judge his research competency, I think that the chances of bringing this
project to a successful conclusion are minimal.

I therefore give the application as submitted a rating of 3 on a scale
of 1 (low) to 10 (high score) and I recommend that funding be denied.

Date: 16 March 1618 Signature:

Wolf D. Seufert is in the medical faculty at the Universite de Sherbrooke,
Quebec, Canada.

So some guy wants to do a master’s degree in your lab, not because of
your international reputation, but because he failed the entrance exam in
masseur college and believes that biophysics is the next best thing. He
has a first degree in the martial arts from a place beyond the date line
and hard to spell; the registrar of your university considers his credentials
by the letter and declares him technically admissible.

The next grant deadline is coming up and you need help to get a few
more results. Besides, your type of work is unique, nobody could ever come
prepared for it anyway, and you might as well knead and trim the fellow
to your specifications. You hire him on the basis of his potential, give
him a chance with a safe project.

A cornucopia of trouble and grief starts to loom and sets gaggles of
underemployed lawyers grinning. First you find out that your candidate is
a lefty with two right hands, a reformed cryptopyromaniac who has since
sublimated his urges into pestering either gender. As this occupies him
full-time, you give him warning shots in ever decreasing intervals and finally
bring the full brunt of your best argument to bear on him, namely, that
his attitude won’t ever get him into gainful employment. To this he responds
with a catatonic sneer, a string of obscene gestures and a litany of satanic
curses. You fire him on the spot. This is what they call the scenario, true
to reality.

What comes next exists, I hope, only in my prankish imagination. Two
days after the event, you get a registered letter from a lawyer who represents
the miscreant. You are being sued for having neglected to honour a verbal
contract in which you undertook to further the education of the plaintiff.
You have paid him a few months’ salary and this is taken as de facto proof
of the existence of a contract. The award sought in damages is the difference
of your student’s projected lifetime earnings as a full professor and as
a part-time chicken sexer, and it sends cold shivers over parts of your
anatomy you thought you no longer had.

The outcome of the suit cannot be imagined since it depends on how much
money you are willing to spend on your lawyer. Most likely you’ll settle;
someone questions your teaching, and the suspicion of being derelict in
one of your duties will send university administrators scurrying for grounds
on which to dismiss you. You are in a bind.

The point is that we teachers have to come up with a contract which
holds us to what we are able to provide, and which holds our students to
the diligence habitual when exercising a profession in research. We have
to devise the contract before someone thinks of exacting a guarantee.

Actually, graduate students are pretty vulnerable, exposed to the whims
of some little autocrat whose lines they’ll have to sing, or else. So laying
everything down in a contract (let’s call it an agreement) will turn out
to be of benefit to both parties. Stories of the powerless student buckling
under the almighty professor will finally be relegated to collections of
historical anecdotes. And without the fear of prejudice, our students might
even show a little more initiative.

The panning season in Quebec lasts all the way from the time the leaves
come out, which is in June, to early September when they come off again.
Before and after that, you would not want to stand in the water of a fast-flowing
creek, stooped double to wash the sand out of your pan. Unless you have
really become bitten by the gold bug and do not mind having a bout of rheumatism
lock you in this posture.

It is best, though, to wait for the cover of leaves. You go out there
into the wild because you want to find gold, not as a convenient marker
for the luck of others. Until you find enough to make you jump up and down
twice, you are also very sensitive to comments from strangers. They will
tend to remark that there is more money in fishing, or advise you that this
is the exact spot where a bull moose last year mated with a fellow from
the city who smelled of the same insect repellent you bought from the Mohawks.
Besides, you want to go back to the revered tradition of the Canadian pioneers
and leave your car parked out of sight, behind the wall of greenery.

You come prepared with a pair of rubber waders which have a way of falling
to your ankles and conveniently catch enough water in the process to hold
you steady against the swiftest of currents. Woollen socks thicker than
a mosquito sting are a must, as are outer garments made of sailcloth tough
enough to resist abrasion. They, in turn, will abrade all softer parts chafing
within. You recognise experienced prospectors by their sparing moves.

Quebec wildlife is the source of envy for mollycoddled Europeans. We
have varieties of flies, for instance, as yet unknown to zoology. Panners
will encounter, without fail, the ground-attack class which is known, in
the local patois, as ‘frappe a barre’. This operational description, which
loosely translates as ‘hit with a crowbar’, is meant to convey the sense
of imbalance experienced when not bitten by two of the flies synchronously
and symmetrically about the rump.

Adequately protected are your eyeballs provided you blink rapidly, your
feet as long as you are standing in the water, and your sensitive nasal
epithelia if you shut your nose with a clothes peg and inhale vigorously
through your teeth. Repellents work on the principle of ‘lesser evil’-that
is, the smell lets you forget about the bite. The same effect comes cheaper
if you hit yourself periodically on the shin with your prospector’s shovel.

The adjustment period before you, the novice panner, will be able to
exercise your skill, is shortened by repeated swigs of Caribou. This liquid
provokes deep inhalations and expectorations, and it doubles as an anaesthetic.
It also reduces the need for pork and beans, the standard fare of the outdoors
shunned when indoors.

The creek you have selected comes running from a pile of mineral deposits,
long ago rocks that were crushed by glaciers. The water carries flakes of
gold washed out from these deposits, either directly or from subsequent
sediments (placer or alluvial gold). You will have a chance of finding them
when you dig down into the sand on the outside of one of the bends in the
creek. This is where the current hits the embankment, and the resulting
turbulence brings the gold flakes to settle by their weight.

You lift the larger stones, dig up a few shovels of gravel and sieve
the sand into your pan. Then you have to rock the pan in the water to wash
the sand slowly over the rim and, if you are lucky, a few small flakes of
gold will show up on its concentric grooves.

Not much to it but you have to keep your eyes open not to miss the glittering
stuff, or to dismiss it as mica. When in doubt, collect all suspicious shimmers
in some water in an aspirin bottle, and look at them under a magnifying
glass when you are back at home.

There really are loads of gold in Quebec. Go to one of the tributaries
of the Saint-Francois close to the town of Sherbrooke, or of the Riviere
Dutton or of the Riviere Filbert, all in southeastern Quebec. One single
industrial operation, the Beauce Placer Corporation, extracted 4000 ounces
(110 kilograms) of gold in its first year, 1961. Two nuggets weighing in
at about 40 troy ounces each were found about the same time in the vicinity
of Saint George de Beauce.

Do not raise your hopes too high, but you will certainly come away from
a panning excursion with something to show for your efforts. And all quite
apart from a decent tan and a sense of having gone through an honest adventure.

Wolf D. Seufert is in the medical faculty at the Universite de Sherbrooke,
Quebec, Canada.