Sick Beans and Healthy People

What may be a big episode in the fantastic serial story of the sulfa-drugs appeared in the Journal of Heredity last week. Though doctors can cure a growing list of bacterial diseases--pneumonia, meningitis, streptococcic infections, erysipelas, childbed fever, gonorrhea, etc.--with sulfanilamide and other sulfa compounds, they have little biochemical understanding of how the drugs work. Plant Physiologist Hamilton Paul Traub of the U.S. Horticultural Station (at Beltsville, Md.) added to that little knowledge by discovering that these beneficent drugs, when used on normal plants, make them stunted, freakish, wrinkled.

Plantman Traub treated kidney beans by: 1) soaking the seeds before planting in a weak sulfanilamide solution; 2) watering bean cuttings with it. In most of the plants thus treated, the leaves were misshapen, fluted, twisted--sometimes resembled leaves with a bad case of the virus-caused mosaic disease. Microscopic study of individual cells in the plants showed great changes in the cellular nuclei. Some cells had doubled chromosomes (nuclear carriers of the genes which determine inherited characteristics). Other cells had enlarged, dumbbell-shaped or even twin nuclei. Since cells multiply by division of the nucleus accompanied by division of the cellular walls, sulfa treatment of plants seems to permit nuclear division while inhibiting cellular division.

Significance of Traub's findings: Bacteria are generally classified by biologists as fungi--non-cholorophyllose, parasitic, one-celled plants. So the effects of sulfa drugs on the cells of more complex plants like beans should help to explain why and how the drugs inhibit the growth of bacteria within the human body.

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