Peeking

At the agricultural experiment station of Pennsylvania State College, veterinarians trussed up Jessie, two-year-old heifer, and plugged her as though she were a watermelon. Dr. S. L. Bechtel of the station had noted that Heifer Jessie's milk contained Vitamin B, although none of the fodder she ate carried any. The question whether Jessie manufactured her own Vitamin B was very important.

There are only five vitamins known. Vitamin A stimulates body growth; Vitamin B prevents neuritis (beriberi is a characteristic disease following deprivation of this essential) ; Vitamin C prevents scurvy; Vitamin D prevents rickets; and Vitamin E must be present if an animal is to be fecund. All of these vitamins are extremely unstable chemical compounds. None of them has been definitively examined, yet their reactions on living animals are well-known and they can be isolated and handled as unseen principles.

Heretofore the biochemists have considered that all the vitamins are derived from plants, although it is well-known that ultraviolet light can energize cholesterol and phytosterol (cholesterol is a constituent of animal cells, phytosterol, of plant cells) to behave like Vitamin D as a rickets-preventive. It might be that the ultraviolet light actually created Vitamin D. Vitamins found in milk, cod liver oil and fresh flesh have been supposed to have come ultimately from plants that carried such vitamins.

If Dr. Bechtel could peek in Heifer Jessie's stomachs he might be able to decide whether she really created vitamins herself.

The operation was under local anesthetic. Heifer Jessie did not wince as the veterinarians scoured a patch of hide and cut a window into her first stomach. This was her rumen or paunch, where she was storing up her freshly swallowed fodder. Later, when these annoying men departed, she would regurgitate a large fistful and chew it at contented leisure, mixing it with saliva, so that it would slide down, a warm and pleasant blob of food, into her second stomach. This was her reticulum, her honeycomb stomach, which some day will be used for honeycomb tripe. (The rumen constitutes ordinary tripe.) From the reticulum the food would pass through the third (omasum, bullock tripe) and fourth (abomasum, where milk-curdling rennet is manufactured) stomachs, then on into the intestines.

It is in Heifer Jessie's first stomach that the Pennsylvania State scientists believe they will find Vitamin B manufactured. Each day they will scoop a trifle of predigested vitamin-less hay through the cow's little window and feed it to dieted rats. If the rats do not get neuritis, Jessie does make Vitamin B. If they do get neuritis, then the experiment will have been usefully foolish. It will have closed one more needless door of scientific research.