Medicine: Extracts for Ulcers

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Chief cause of peptic ulcers, which afflict about 330,000 U. S. citizens (mostly business and professional men), is oversecretion of harsh gastric juice. Gastric juice, when abnormally acid, erodes the delicate lining of the stomach, produces inflamed spots near its lower end. To experimenters who have long been seeking an easily available chemical which would check gastric secretion in ulcer patients, Physiologists John Stephens Gray, Elfie Wieczorowski and famed Researcher Andrew Conway Ivy of Chicago's Northwestern University brought hopeful data last week. In Science they reported that "extracts of normal male urine," injected in small amounts, "are very potent in inhibiting gastric secretion" of dogs. What the inhibiting agent of urine was, they could not say, nor did they venture to predict its effect on human beings.