Rats

Pigs eat coal with relish, digest it with ease. As laboratory animals they are therefore incapable of shedding much light on human nutrition. Rats, on the other hand, have the same eating habits as man. They need the same minerals and vitamins, fall prey to many of the same diseases. On them new serums, drugs and poisons are tried out. More experimental work has been done with the white, pink-eyed rat (Mus Norvegicus albinus) than with the meek guinea pig -- more, in fact, than with all other mammals combined. If men are ever able to thrive on synthetic food pills, those pills must first suffice for the rat.

For three years Biochemist William Gumming Rose and his associates at University of Illinois have fed artificially-made food to white rats. Of the ingredients in natural food only the proteins furnish nitrogen available for tissue building. Chemists have broken down the proteins into more than 20 simpler compounds called amino acids. Dr. Rose accordingly prepared and purified all the amino acids he knew of, fed them to baby rats together with synthetic carbohydrates, fats, salts and vitamins. Something was lacking. The animals failed to grow, wasted away, died. Then Dr. Rose succeeded in isolating another protein component: alpha -amino -beta -hydroxybutyric acid. When this was added to their food, the young rats grew and thrived. Thus the Illinois biochemists put their finger on the final, elusive substance that must go into a good synthetic meal for rats, and presumably for men.

Describing these experiments last week, Dr. Rose said that eight other amino acids have been found essential to life, seven others nonessential. Work on the value of the remaining protein components continues.

Dr. Rose bred his rats from a group originally purchased ten years ago. Most U. S. white rat experimenters, however, get their supply from the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology at University of Pennsylvania. There in specially built steel and concrete buildings, under the watchful eye of Dr. Henry Herbert Donaldson, world authority on Mus Norvegicus albinus, hordes of white rats are fed and pampered as carefully as princelings. For 96 generations the rats have breathed only pure and sterile air. Visitors who might bring in germs are shooed off. Eventually it is hoped that the animals will be wholly free of disease, a perfect race of rats. Meanwhile the price is $45 per hundred, f.o.b. Philadelphia.

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