Medicine: Capsules, Apr. 29, 1957

¶ The late Alfred C. Kinsey's famed sex studies, threatened with financial anemia as support from the Rockefeller Foundation-National Research Council was running out, got a life-saving transfusion: the U.S. Public Health Service allotted $151,693 to Indiana University's Institute for Sex Research for a study of sex offenders entangled with the law.

¶ Ten-day-old chicks are better than monkeys for testing the potency of polio vaccine, researchers have found. Though federal rules now require each vaccine batch to be tested for three weeks on twelve monkeys, the chicks (cheaper and far easier to handle) do a better job in about five days.

¶ Narcotics addiction is 100 times more common among physicians than the general population, reported Detroit's Dr. J. DeWitt Fox, after analyzing federal statistics. One doctor in every 100 is a present or possible future victim. Main reasons: emotional problems, pressure of work or pain, plus easy access to the drugs.

¶ To help families who must find donors to give matched fresh blood (up to ten pints) a few hours before major surgery inside the heart (TIME, March 25), Warden Douglas Rigg of Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison made his 1,225 convicts available as volunteers to the University of Minnesota Reformatory. Both these groups—unlike most blood-bank donors, who have trouble getting free time to fit surgeons' schedules—will always be on tap.

¶ Drugs made from curare (South American arrow poison) make surgery safer by relaxing patients' muscles. Similarly, reports the National Heart Institute, a drug named strophanthidin, from an African arrow poison, has been found to reduce the danger of heart stoppage during operations under hypothermia.