Sluggard's Prod

The editor warned: "Drug with the potency and effects of dinitrophenol is a two-edged sword with appalling possibilities for harm as well as for good."

The investigators warned: "It should be used only under strictly controlled conditions."

And the A. M. A. Council on Pharmacy & Chemistry last week refused to approve the use of the compound as a medicine. Dinitrophenol of which they all were so fearful promises to be a vigorous prod for sluggards and a subtle weapon for murderers. It is a yellow, crystalline powder closely related to picric acid (of which explosives and ointments for burns are made). It costs only $12 a pound and is easily purchasable.

At Stanford University School of Medicine, San Francisco, upon the suggestion of the late Acting Dean Henry George Mehrtens (neuropsychiatrist interested in artificial fevers), Dr. Windsor Cooper Cutting, 25, and Professor Maurice Lane Tainter, 34, have been cautiously trying out the effects of dinitrophenol on themselves, friends and animals. They have found, they declared in an eager preliminary report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that:

P: A quantity of dinitrophenol five one-millionths of a person's weight (seven grains for a 200-lb. man or woman) increased a person's metabolism by 30%, made him half again as lively as before getting the dose. This sluggard's prodding has been kept up for three months with no ascertainable discomfort or injury to the people experimented on. An equivalent dosage of thyroid gland, another dissipator of indolence, would have made the experimentees irritable. Dinitrophenol caused no nervousness, anxiety, trembling, hunger or palpitation. It raised neither temperature, respiration nor pulse.

P: Ten grains of dinitrophenol caused profuse sweating.

P: Fourteen grains caused all the signs of high fever--temperature up 3DEG C., pulse up 20 to 30 beats a minute, respiration up 15 to 30 a minute.

P: Bigger dosages raised the metabolic rate, fever, respiration and pulse of animals until they died, simply of living too fast.

P: Five-grain doses, or slightly less reduced fat men and women two pounds a week without exercise or diet, made them feel better and more active. The investigators suggest that this dinitrophenol dose be tried cautiously for myxedema and other phenomena of sub-functioning thyroids.

P: The fact that dinitrophenol burns sugar and starch in healthy animals suggests that it should be good for diabetics, who do not handle their sugar and starch properly. But, strangely, diabetic dogs were easily poisoned by dinitrophenol.

P: The effects of dinitrophenol have not been tried on sick people, because the San Francisco investigators have not yet probed all its pharmacological repercussions. Investigators Cutting and Tainter begged last week that, "for the present, dinitrophenol be used only as an experimental therapeutic procedure in carefully selected patients under close observation by the physician."

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