In Coop and Cage

Dr. Riddle's pigeons laid golden eggs, all yolk with neither shell nor white, because he removed their thymus glands. Dr. Rowntree's husky baby rats played precociously because he stimulated their thymus glands with sweetbread extract. Then Dr. Riddle turned another neat trick by giving sweetbread extract to his thymectomized pigeons, which promptly began to lay normal, shell eggs.

Neither Dr. Oscar Riddle of the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, nor Director Leonard George Rowntree of the Philadelphia Institute for Medical Research knew precisely what they were talking about when they reported these God-like doings in coop and cage last week. Chemists were still analyzing the substances used. But results were as clear as startling, and threw knowledge upon the gland which in cattle is called sweet bread, in children the thymus. The thymus, one of the potent ductless glands, lies just behind the breastbone immediately above the heart. Only occasion when the thymus becomes important is when, for no known reason, it grows big, causes a peculiar hoarse breathing, a continuous choking sensation (which may end in actual suffocation), or that strange condition called status lymphaticus whose slender, soft-skinned, sexually immature victims may at any moment drop dead. Obscure though the function of the thymus is, it occurs in all creatures from fish to man. In man, it shrivels as adolescence wanes, becomes only a vestige with age. Dr. Rowntree, following the lead of an old friend, Dr. Adolph Melanchton Hanson of remote Faribault, Minn., injected rats with extracts of cattle thymi (sweetbreads). Nothing unusual seemed to happen, except that the females produced more babies than undosed females. Dr. Rowntree dosed the babies, but got no more obvious results than a continued statistical excess of births. Third, fourth and subsequent generations, however, proved astonishing. Rats generally do not breed before they are 50 to 70 days old. But one of Dr. Rowntree's third-generation rats became a mother when she was only 42 days old. One of the fourth-generation rats was a father at 29 days. They and all the rats of their generations were as big, sleek and fertile as well-fed oldsters. To show people who would not believe their ears, Dr. Rowntree brought two perforated cardboard boxes to a meeting of the Philadelphia County Medical Society last week. Each box contained a litter of four-day-old rats. In one, the pink, hairless, blind, toothless, throbbing blobs were children of ordinary rats. In the other thymized youngsters of precisely the same age frisked about bright-eyed, white and toothy. If boys and girls were in a similar thymic state, they might be fully ready for parenthood at the age of eight or ten. But that thought suggested sociological possibilities from which Dr. Rowntree and his biological friends shied. Two days later, Dr. Riddle told his story of the soft golden eggs. Into the eager-eared members of Manhattan's American Institute who gave him a gold medal for the occasion, he poured a rhapsody on thymovidin, his name for the thymic extract he used. "When," cried he, "these studies were made, the thymus which we all wear close to our hearts, was becoming regarded as an endocrine outlaw. Never have I stepped out upon lighter, more exhilarating air than during those days when I obtained, to me, convincing evidence that this hitherto baffling badge upon our hearts is an enduring souvenir of those dim and distant ancestral days when eggs were eggs--each housing the developing spark of life that, from first to last, those lowly ancestors of ours had a freedom and independence worthy of the name."

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