Happy Accident

As a boy, Thrace-born Alexander Symeonidis wanted to study art. When his family went broke, he studied medicine instead, because it promised to pay more. A former professor of pathology at the University of Athens, and now a pathologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., he gets artistic satisfaction in turning out carefully stained slides, which he excitedly refers to as "beautiful."

Last week Dr. Symeonidis, 39, had something special to get excited about. The National Cancer Institute announced that he had found a clue to the cause of eclampsia, a disease occurring in pregnancy that causes one-fifth of all maternal deaths in the U.S. Its victims have high blood pressure and damaged kidneys, often die in convulsions.

The discovery was one of the happy accidents that happen to sharp-eyed researchers. Dr. Symeonidis had fed 20 milligrams of progesterone, an ovarian hormone, to 25 pregnant rats. His purpose was to cause cancer; instead, the rats developed eclampsia. It was the first time the disease had been produced experimentally in animals. What Dr. Symeonidis had done was to throw the hormonal balance out of whack. Microscopic slides showed that the rats had suffered changes in liver, kidneys and placenta that human eclampsia patients suffer.

Much more research and many more carefully stained slides will be needed before doctors find a clue to the cure of eclampsia. But a clue to the cause is a big start. Eclampsia is such a mysterious ailment that it has baffled doctors for 4,000 years and has been nicknamed the "disease of theories."

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