Medicine: Corn & Sleeping Sickness

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When Alma Jessie Neill was a girl on an Illinois farm, the corn she raised won prizes. Alma Neill left her farm to study physiology, is now professor of her subject at the University of Oklahoma, but she has never lost her interest in corn. Five years ago, when an epidemic of what doctors called encephalitis killed 60 people in and about St. Louis, befuddled and paralyzed many more, Professor Neill suspected that infected corn was the cause. Last week a convention of biologists in Baltimore listened respectfully while she explained her diagnosis.

She first suspected that infected sweet corn might have caused the epidemic when she noticed a peculiar discoloration on the stalks of corn in the St. Louis region. She took some of the corn back to her laboratory, fed it to rats and a monkey. The animals developed encephalitis symptoms—stiff necks, nervousness, paralysis—finally died.

There is no telltale mark on the ears of infected corn. And Professor Neill last week persisted in refusing to tell how to identify the deadly stalks. Said she: "We don't want to start something that we can't stop. As soon as we discover how the disease gets on the corn and where it comes from, it then will be possible to start work to stop it."

She has noted the infection only in Missouri corn. Last year it was presumably responsible for the paralysis and death of 3,000 Oklahoma horses from equine encephalitis.