Progress Reports

The nation's medical research laboratories were stripped of their key men last week as 6,500 physiologists, biologists, pharmacologists, pathologists, nutritionists and immunologists swarmed into Atlantic City for meetings of their consortium, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, to tell of advances in their fight to gain life-saving knowledge. Outstanding items: P: The pituitary gland, long given homage as producer of the "master" hormone ACTH,* is itself the slave of a truly imperial hormone secreted by a part of the brain, reported Baylor University's Physiologist Roger Guillemin. From the hypothalamus, an ancient part of the brain, Guillemin and Baylor colleagues have isolated a highly potent fraction, "hypothalamic D," which puts the pituitary to work when the animal (or human) is faced by physical or mental stress. Also named the "ACTH-hypophysiotropic hormone," it can be injected to give the same results as a shot of ACTH, e.g., in rheumatoid arthritis, by a more natural method. P: A series of changes in liver function shortly before and after birth enables the newborn mammal (whether human or rat makes no difference) to withstand the shock of emergence into the world, said a team of Boston biochemists headed by Harvard's Dr. Claude A. Villee. A few days before birth the liver builds up a supply of glycogen (a starch) for future conversion into sugar and fats (for energy). During and after birth the infant needs a lot of energy in a hurry, and since he cannot feed for several hours, the liver reverses the starch-storing process and turns the glycogen into energy. When the baby begins feeding, the liver goes on to a normal, lifelong rate of glycogen manufacture. P: "Such stuff as dreams are made on" brought unsuspected data from Chicago Physiologists William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman: a person can dream for an average of two hours a night and remember little of it; his chances of remembering decrease the longer he sleeps after the dream ends; dreaming does not take place while the body is restless in light sleep; far from flashing by almost instantaneously (as commonly believed), dreams can last as long as an hour. A key to dreams is eye movement, which can be detected by electrodes attached to the eyelids. Vertical movements suggest that the dream in progress involves climbing or falling; horizontal, that the dreamer is following the actions of dream figures across a scene. Subjects awakened five minutes after a flurry of eye movements had far clearer recollections of dreams than those allowed a 15-minute lapse. P: Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists checked on fellow employees, found that of 135 who never added salt to their food, only one had unexplained high-blood pressure; of 630 who added salt sometimes after tasting food, 43 had the disease; among 581 who always added salt without bothering to taste, 61 had it. P: Studies at the University of Michigan's Child Health Conference (Well-Baby Clinic) answered a bedeviling question: Is the Salk polio vaccine as effective among infants and pre-school children as among the first-and second-graders on whom it was first tried? Said the researchers, after testing 133 infants and 116 kindergartners on various inoculation schedules: yes. P: One of the commonest features of heart disease is congestive heart failure, in which the heart periodically or progressively fails to meet the body's demands for blood and dangerously overworks. It causes "dropsy"--the body's retention of salt and water. One standard way to get rid of excess brine has been to inject a mercurial diuretic. Five research reports at Atlantic City meetings indicated that a mercurial drug to be taken regularly by mouth, chlormerodrin (Neo-hydrin), is both effective and safe for long-term use.

* Among its "slaves": the kidney-bestriding adrenal glands which secrete hydrocortisone.

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