Weighing a Complement

For the intricate processes of giving people immunity against disease, instead of waiting to cure them after they have been stricken (gamma globulin and vaccines for polio are the latest examples), medical science has a relatively new name: immunochemistry. Last week judges for the Lasker Awards recognized its importance by picking as one of 1953's winners Dr. Michael Heidelberger, 65, of New York City, for "decisive contributions to mankind in developing a new subscience. the precise measuring tool of immunochemistry."

Immunization itself is not new, but more than a century after Edward Jenner discovered vaccination, immunology was still largely, according to Lasker judges, ''a descriptive science which applied bizarre name's to odd properties of ill defined or hypothetical substances." Doctors knew that there were such things as antigens (mostly proteins and highfalutin sugars called polysaccharides). and that these could stimulate the human system to produce antibodies. These were important in vaccines and protective serums, and also in tests like the Wassermann. But doctors did not know whether to use a drop or a bucketful because they could not accurately measure the strength of their preparations.

Work at the Rockefeller Institute on pneumococci (the commonest pneumonia germs) led Manhattan-born Chemist Heidelberger to devise precise ways to measure antigens and antibodies and also a mysterious something in the blood, awkwardly called "complement." There had even been doubt as to whether complement was a substance or a state; Dr.

Heidelberger proved its substantial nature by weighing it.

The serum of guinea pigs is especially rich in complement, an essential factor in the Wassermann and other tests. Dr. Heidelberger and his associates (he is now professor of immunochemistry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons) found chemical ways of making guinea-pig serum go twice as far. As he puts it. with a dry smile: "Rivers of guinea-pig blood could have been saved if these methods had been known 50 years ago." He is too modest to add that millions of blood tests now performed in research laboratories every day are simpler, quicker, cheaper, and vastly more reliable than ever before. Also, researchers preparing new vaccines can use precise quantities of pure components.

Dr. Heidelberger suggested, during a recent trip to India, using the elephant as a mass producer of serum fractions. To transform the elephant into a mobile factory of anti-antibodies for diagnostic tests seems a simple trick to the ingenious Dr. Heidelberger--for recreation, he once rearranged a Brahms trio so that he could play the horn part on his clarinet.

Other Lasker winners: P: Nobelman Hans Adolf Krebs. biochemist (TIME. Nov. 2). P:Biologist George Wald, 46 of Harvard, for exploring the chemistry of vision. P:State Health Officer Felix J. Underwood, 71, of Mississippi, for expanding public-health services. P:Bacteriologist Earle B. Phelps (who died in June) for pioneering in sanitary science.

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