Points by Prizemen

The New York Academy of Medicine last week announced that Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prizewinner, member of the Rockefeller Institute, author of Man the Unknown (TIME. Sept. 16), would make one of his rare public appearances to talk on the "Mystery of Death." On the scheduled evening some 5,000 laymen tried to enter the Academy halls. Fully 2,000 were driven away by police. Next morning the New York Herald Tribune echoed the excitement by a report which occupied eight column feet of space. The New York Times used six feet, other papers a total of ten feet. Nothing quite like it had happened to a doctor since Dr. Carrel, 24 years ago, announced that he had started a piece of chicken embryo toward perpetual life.

Last week Dr. Carrel made his great audience believe that scientists have immortality in their power. Said he: "Although remote, some individuals could be put in storage for long periods of time, brought back to normal existence for other periods, and permitted in this manner to live for several centuries. We should remember the Utopias of today are sometimes the realities of tomorrow."

Scientific Carrel carefully warned: ''There is no hope of ever conquering senescence and death."

Mystic Carrel declared: "There is no scientific proof at the present time of the survival after death of the mind. But no one has the right to say that such survival is impossible."

All this mightily annoyed many an orthodox scientist, particularly Dr. Anton Julius Carlson, University of Chicago physiologist in whose laboratory Dr. Carrel did much of the experimenting which led to his Nobel Prize. Snorted Dr. Carlson: "Neither science nor modern medicine!

I can't believe that Dr. Carrel is willing to befuddle and mislead the public and injure science and medicine for the shallow fame of personal publicity."

Altogether different was the simultaneous appearance four blocks away of Dean George Koyt Whipple of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, winner of a Nobel Prize for discovering the value of liver diet in overcoming pernicious anemia (TIME. Nov. 5, 1934). Important doctors completely filled Mount Sinai Hospital's auditorium, listened decorously while Dr. Whipple, his throat raw with a cold, described how blood is formed and regenerated within the body. A significant new fact: infections do not prevent the formation of hemoglobin which the body needs to recover from disease, but. do prevent the release of that essential iron-containing substance into the blood stream where it can do the body good.

Only newspaper to report Dr. Whipple's points was the Herald Tribune in nine column inches.

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