Spring Awards

In medicine, as in other fields, spring is the time for laurels. Last week two outstanding medical scientists got theirs, with some berries attached.

Glycogen. The $5,000 annual award of the Sugar Research Foundation went to Austrian-born Dr. Carl Cori of Washington University Medical School, St. Louis. Pale, tall Dr. Cori, 51, specializes in sugar, the basic fuel of human metabolism. For 20 years he has traced the progress of sugar through the body, watched it turn into glycogen (animal starch), measured how much glycogen is stored in the muscles and liver.

Cori's most important work throws light on the mysterious action of insulin. A shot of insulin allows a diabetic to use up sugar as a normal person does. But if insulin is added to sugar in a test tube, nothing happens. Why? Apparently the body furnishes other substances to effect the reaction. Dr. Cori has found some of these substances and has learned how they work. But he wants no one (not even the eager Sugar Research Foundation) to get the idea that he knows the whole story of sugar. If he did, he could answer a question that stumps all medicos: just how does sugar fuel the body's metabolism?

Grisein. The $5,000 Passano Foundation Award (kicked in by Williams & Wilkins of Baltimore, medical publishers) went to Russian-born Dr. Selman Abraham Waksman, 59, microbiologist of Rutgers and the New Jersey Agricultural Station. Dr. Waksman is certainly a leading U.S.-authority on antibiotics. His best-known discovery (1945) was streptomycin, the antibiotic which has shown most promise in the fight against tuberculosis. Early this year he persuaded his favorite mold (Actinomyces griseus) to produce another antibiotic (TIME, Feb. 10). The new one, "grisein," teams up efficiently with streptomycin (in the test tube) to fight a variety of stubborn bacteria.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.