Physiological Circus

Last week round-faced Dr. George Washington Crile formally unveiled in his Cleveland Clinic a stupendous museumful of stuffed animals and a new physiological theory. The museum was completed last March when Dr. Crile went to Miami, hired a Goodyear blimp, wandered cloudlike over the blue Gulf Stream in search of a manatee. When he at last sighted one in an estuary, he blimped back to shore, boarded a speedboat, bagged it (935 lb.). In Cleveland the manatee, like some twelve score other animals Crile has collected from Lake Tanganyika to Hudson Bay in the past 15 years, has its excised brain, heart, thyroid and adrenal glands on display. Ringmaster Crile's animal act is more elaborate than any Carl Hagenbeck ever cracked a whip over.

The animals and their organs illustrate the physiological theory on which Dr. Crile has been working, not too secretly, for a long time. The theory: in all animals except man and the higher apes, the rate of metabolism is almost directly proportional to brain weight: 12.15 calories per gram of brain each 24 hours. Compared with his body, man's brain is larger than any other animal's, thus puts a greater strain on his organic activities. So such ills as high blood pressure, exophthalmic goiter, diabetes are almost unique in civilized man, rare in aborigines and beasts. They are the price man pays for his superiority over other forms of life.

Many scientists respectfully follow Dr. Crile this far. But they stop and watch critically as he plunges onward into his electrodynamic theory of animal energy: Chemical energy in the brain, he announced last week, charges it with positive electricity; and the heart-pumped friction of red blood corpuscles rushing through their arterial courses generates negative static electricity.

"This new conception," Crile said, "brings the heart and the blood into dynamic partnership with the brain, the sympathetic system and the sense organs. The positive charge ... is distributed [from the brain] to every part of the body by nerve fibers. The negative charge ... is distributed to every minute part of the body by the red blood cells in the capillaries."

This electrical interchange, always in delicate balance, is, he believes, the energy system called life. Over this mystery, energetic Surgon Crile has brooded since he was an intern in 1887. "It bothered me so much it kept me awake at night," he said. "And on a sleepless night last week it all came to me. It was all very simple."

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