Medicine: Big Beat

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Boston's famed Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White, 73, is almost as eager as was Captain Ahab to sink a harpoon into the mightiest leviathan of the deep, but for a different reason: he wants to record its electrocardiogram. Dr. White has logged the ECG of a small (only 1¼ ton) Beluga whale in Alaska (TIME, Aug. 25, 1952), but has been thwarted in efforts to get his electrodes into the bigger grey whale off California. Last week he was within a heartbeat of an equally desirable prize, and missed by a fluke.

The whale in question was no Moby Dick (a monstrous albino sperm whale) but a finback measuring 44 ft. 2 in. and weighing an estimated 50 tons. It was no Moby Dick by temperament either: far from eluding pursuit, it seemed to seek out Dr. White. No fewer than five times it ran itself aground at Provincetown, virtually on Dr. White's Boston doorstep (though he was in Washington). Four times the U.S. Coast Guard hitched a 3-in. hawser to it and towed it out to sea, only to have it snap the line and return with a derisive spout. Fifth time, an observer phoned the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 60 miles away. There Dr. John W. Kanwisher put in a hurried call to Dr. White, then drove to Provincetown, where he had to spend the night on the beach, waiting for the low tide. Dr. White tried to get there by air, was defeated by icing.

A healthy adult finback should have a slow pulse—only twelve to the minute or less. But by the time the Woods Hole scientists had it wired, the Provincetown specimen was sick at heart, its pulse racing at an uncetacean 27—still only one-third the rate of the excited Dr. Kanwisher (see cut). An hour before Dr. White got to its beachside, the whale died and was rigged for towing to sea.