Medicine: Capsules, Mar. 4, 1957

<]J At an age (two years) when he should have enjoyed the bounding prime of youth, a Utah beagle's muzzle was grey, his bones brittle, his joints creaky. Reason: since puppyhood, he had received regular injections of radioactive isotopes at the University of Utah's Beagleville (TIME, Dec. 27, 1954). Radiobiologists guessed that constant exposure to internal radiation somehow diminished the beagle's natural resistance to stress, accelerating the aging process. Further studies of radioactive beagles may provide clues to the nature of the aging process in man, suggest ways to impede it.

t| Doctors are learning to control phenyl-pyruvic oligophrenia, a brain-crippling disease of infants caused by the body's failure to assimilate a protein called phenylalanine. University of Minnesota nutritionists report the case of a one-year-old boy in whom a diet of enriched and predigested milk protein, plus fruits and vegetables, arrested the disease. <jj One of medicine's poorer risks is the patient with a damaged heart muscle who suffers a second severe heart attack. Doctors at Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital have devised a way of using a heart-lung machine to help selected cardiac repeaters survive the critical first six to eight hours. The heart-lung machine, previously used mainly in heart surgery to provide the surgeon with a dry field, takes blood from the leg vein of a patient, infuses oxygen, filters out bubbles in a pad of steel wool and returns the blood under pressure into an arm artery. By thus handling the circulation of about one-third of the body's blood supply, the machine sometimes relieves an ailing heart muscle of enough of its load to keep it going. In the first two cardiac cases so treated at Kings County, one got "dramatic relief," a second "less-striking improvement."