Then they assayed to look but, .... they could not look steadily through the glass; yet they thought they saw something like the gate, and also some of the glory. . . .

Bun van. Pilgrim's Progress

Each individual sees the mass of details which compose his surroundings in a different way and with a different intensity. If these impressions are then communicated in speech or in writing, a variety of renderings of the overall picture are obtained. When, as in the case of scientific and medical reporting, only a restricted number of details are known, with others still to be discovered or to be freed of their veils, the description of certain aspects becomes even more individualistic and depends on the emphasis given by the spectator.

Now, here is a chemist (collective noun for bio-, physical, organic and inorganic chemists) who looks at an essentially biological subject, such as cancer with its great complexities; he will see only vaguely the clinical, pathological, histological, genetical, etc. side, but will concentrate on the molecular level, and what does he discern there? An enormous number of single results, some parcelled up to form concepts or hypotheses, but an even greater number of unsolved or unattacked problems. So the picture which is offered to him is like a piece of dye stuff treated malignant tissue under the microscope of the histo pathologist, with dark patches and light ones, the whole a bewildering mass of dots and streaks. Perhaps he can see the cells when he uses a greater magnification and better still, the membranes, nuclei, cytoplasms with their subcellular particles, including sometimes fragments which could be of a virus like nature. Changing to the electron microscope and applying cytochemical methods he can, under expert guidance, spy the fine structures of chromosomes and nucleoli, and with the greatest magnification, something which is a large molecule of the nucleic acid or protein type.

But there ends the visual penetration and other means, often divorced from the living cell, have to be found and applied, to guess at the complicated and some times harmonious and at other times apparently disturbed events on a molecular level which multiplied by quantity, shaped by quality and moved by dynamics lead back to those happenings and states which the biologist can pick up again under his microscope, or further still, the experimental pathologist in tissues or whole organisms, and finally the clinician in man.