Medicine: Capsules, Dec. 3, 1956

¶ Two years ago Harvard Medical Student Judah Folkman, working under famed Heart Surgeon Robert Gross, got the idea that holes between the ventricles of the human heart might be closed with plastic (polyethylene) patches. Like all such ideas, it was tried first on dogs. Last week in Boston Children's Medical Center, a mongrel named Airplane, with a strip of collie in his bar sinister, was dubbed "Dog Research Hero of the Year," invested with a new collar and silver medallion by Cardiologist Paul Dudley White for having helped to prove the operation feasible. Airplane now leads a pampered existence in Dr. Gross's laboratory, gets periodic heart checkups.

¶ Druggists were bombarded with a publicity barrage based on a report in Industrial Medicine & Surgery that remedies containing bioflavonoids, e.g., vitamin-like citrus extracts, were 74% effective against common colds among McDonnell Aircraft Corp. employees. But simultaneously came two reports in the A.M.A. Journal showing bioflavonoids useless against colds in Dartmouth College students and Sylvania Electric Products, Inc. workers. Warned the U.S. Food & Drug Administration's Dr. Albert H. Holland Jr.: "A cold is still a cold, and facts are facts."