Death to Germs

Medical researchers believe they have tracked down the long-sought factor in human blood that gives it a sweeping power to destroy invading germs. Without such built-in protection against infection, man could hardly survive the daily onslaught by billions of microorganisms to which he is exposed. "Something" saves him, but the nature of that something has remained as elusive as the elixir of life.

Dr. Louis Pillemer and a team of researchers at Cleveland's Western Reserve University make no hard claim to have found the final solution to the puzzle. They have isolated, from the blood serum of both man and animals, a protein that destroys bacteria and neutralizes viruses. Because of its powers, they have named it properdin (from the Latin perdere, to destroy). While the antibody proteins that the system develops after some diseases or inoculations (e.g., polio, diphtheria) are useful only against the organisms that cause the particular disease, properdin is not choosy: it destroys or neutralizes an extremely wide range of bacteria and viruses. Perhaps equally important in the atomic age, properdin seems to increase the body's resistance to the infections that so often follow overexposure of the body to radiation.

Now that the researchers have the stuff (still only in minute quantities), the question is what they can do with it. At the American Cyanamid Co.'s Lederle Laboratories, processes for extracting properdin in bulk are being perfected. Then medical men will try to find out whether man's natural immunity to all infectious disease, or to an immediately threatening attack, can be boosted by shooting more properdin into his veins.

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