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THE SOCIOLOGIST AVRAHAM ZLOCZOWER produced his remarkable master's thesis, "Career Opportunities and the Growth of Scientific Discovery in Nineteenth-Century Germany, with Special Reference to Physiology," in 1960. His basic argument became widely known during the next few years through journal articles written by Zloczower himself and by his thesis director, Joseph Ben-David, and in 1973 the thesis was published in German translation.' The Zloczower thesis represents the most ambitious and persuasive attempt yet made to demonstrate quantitatively that scientific creativity is governed by institutional factors and career motivations external to the cognitive features of the science. In this essay we point out that the original Zloczower argument implicitly contains a "weak" and a "strong" version of his central thesis, each appealing to somewhat different evidence, and we advance a tentative criticism of the strong version. Since most readers are unfamiliar with the detailed evidence on which Zloczower's thesis rests, we begin with a summary that stresses more clearly than did the original the quantitative relationships central to the argument. We acknowledge, however, that our summary hardly does justice to the richness of Zloczower's original, which draws on comparisons between German physiology and that of other nations, and which appeals extensively to historical testimony of the physiologists of the day. Zloczower begins his analysis by assembling a numerical index of scientific creativity or research achievement, specifically the number of "discoveries" or