Regenerating Toes
Another friend, an m.d., once asked me about his studies on
"regeneration". (Remember: Hamilton had little tolerance for what he regarded as
stupidity.) Apparently she took an undergraduate class in field zoology. Apparently, she
was not paying attention to what was going on. She asked about his nicking the toes of
frogs, they were releasing in a pond. (He was doing it for i.d. purposes, to follow their
growth in this pond vs in one on another site, probably for the class to see an example of
how to go about doing a field study.) He gave her some cock-and-bull tale about
studying their ability to regenerate toes that she took literally and still remembered
(literally) four decades later.
Written by Nina Lambert