Magazine content is available exclusively for TIME subscribers.Medicine: Secrets of the Thymus
One of the most baffling glands in the body is the thymus. It lies just below the neck and behind the top of the breastbone, and in all the centuries that man has been studying physiology, its purpose has been unclear. It has hitherto fallen to butchers, marketing the thymus of the lamb and calf as the "neck sweetbread," to give the gland its only obvious usefulness. Now a British cancer researcher, Dr.
Jacques F.A.P. Miller, has found what seems to be the secret of the thymus.
Shaped like a double pendant, the thymus in newborn babies weighs, on the average, one-third of...
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