Medicine: Research Marches On

News from research frontiers, as reported at medical meetings in Atlantic City (see above) last week:

¶ Doctors who have given aureomycin credit for killing some of the tiny viruses as well as the bigger bacteria may have been on the wrong track. Actually, it seems to work this way: the golden antibiotic checks 'bacteria and also reduces fever, but in a case of virus infection (such as influenza), it only suppresses the fever without affecting the virus.

¶ An unexpected use for the artificial kidney was proposed by Washington doctors. It works better than the normal kidney, they found, in extracting barbiturates from the blood, and may help in saving lives of people who have taken overdoses of barbiturate sleeping pills.

¶ Removal of both adrenal glands, a drastic measure which has been tried for relief of extreme high blood pressure (TIME, May 21, 1951), may also have value in treating some types of spreading cancer. Chicago's Dr. Charles B. Huggins and a colleague tried it on 35 patients, got encouraging results in seven cases of prostatic and five cases of breast cancer. After losing their adrenals, the patients take cortisone daily.

¶ Only the merest traces of copper are normally found in the body, and not much has been known about what the copper does. Investigators from Salt Lake City offered a surprising answer: the copper is essential to proper use of iron; without it, animals (and probably humans, too) become anemic.

¶ When the body is not getting enough food, especially sugar, the pituitary gland apparently sees to it that the brain receives the lion's share of the available sugar, because that is the only kind of fuel the brain can use. Dr. Lillian Recant of St. Louis, trying to find out how the pituitary does this job, had one new clue. It is not only the pituitary's growth hormone that serves as a regulator, but some other secretion still undiscovered.

¶ It may be possible to spot, years in advance, people who are doomed to suffer from high blood pressure. University of California researchers believe they have a strong clue in the fact that people showing the first warning signs of hypertension are "more hostile and less well controlled than normal, and less well equipped to cope with . . . stress."