Medicine: Lost & Found

Amid the usual bacteriologist's clutter on Dr. Frederick G. Novy's laboratory bench at Ann Arbor was an unidentified virus which killed rats swiftly. Dr. Novy knew little more about it, but he had 25 test tubes of the virus, flourishing in rat blood. Then he moved his work from one lab to another and the test tubes vanished. That was in 1920, and ever since, Dr. Novy has longed to know what happened to the virus. As the years passed, he was more & more sure of one thing: if the tubes were ever found, the virus would be dead.

Last week the University of Michigan told a strange story. Workers cleaning out a lab found a bundle of test tubes. Inside was dried blood. Officials sent for Dr. Novy. Now 88, he still carries his six-foot frame erect, talks and thinks fast. He took one look and exclaimed: "It's a chance in a million, but I think those tubes contained my lost virus."

There was no way to get the dried blood out of the tubes, so the lab ground up glass, blood and all into a powder, then added liquid and strained the mess. Dr. Novy was as amazed as everybody else when he found that the liquid contained live virus, still capable of killing rats after 30-odd years of desiccation. Now, with younger assistants, Dr. Novy is back at work trying to find out what the virus may mean to man.

Nobody knows for sure who mislaid the virus. But the university's story has one odd twist: the tubes were found in a lab which had been used by Dr. Malcolm H. Soule, who committed suicide (TIME, Aug. 13, 1951) by injecting himself with snake venom.