Science: Respirationist

A stooped, bespectacled man disembarked last week from the Swedish ship Drottningholm, hurried to the campus of Pennsylvania's sedate Swarthmore College where he delivered the first of a series of endowed lectures on respiration. His first audience—biology students, faculty members, townspeople—numbered about 150.

Schack August Steenberg Krogh won a Nobel Prize in 1920 for his studies on the mechanism of blood supply to muscles, showing that a muscle's capillaries work in squads or shifts, most of them remaining closed when the muscle is resting. His great work on respiration, published in 1916, was on the mechanism of gas exchange (carbon dioxide for oxygen) in lungs. Last week he pointed out that animals make structural adaptations to the available oxygen supply as to any other environmental circumstance. Frogs and toads living in oxygen-deficient waters grow abnormally large, those in oxygen-abundant waters abnormally small. South American lungfish develop extra gills when they go down to guard eggs on the oxygen-deficient bottom. Whales when diving supply oxygen only to their brains and their heartbeats fall from about So per minute to four or five.

Dr. Krogh pointed out that the oxygen intake among animals varies enormously according to bodily activity. Per kilogram of body weight, the sluggish mussel uses only 22 cubic centimetres of oxygen per minute while the busy bee consumes 17,000 cc. Man, whose activity rate varies considerably, takes in 200 to 3,000 cc.

On this U. S. visit, Professor Krogh will lecture at the Universities of Minnesota and Chicago as well as Swarthmore, attend biological meetings in Manhattan and elsewhere, taking with him his plain, patient wife, who is a doctor of medicine and has done valuable research on metabolism. Born to a brewer in Denmark's Jutland 65 years ago, August Krogh (pronounced Krug) was fascinated by beetle larvae at the age of four. At the University of Copenhagen he ripped with great speed and facility through courses in physics, chemistry and biology, specialized in zoology, studied the respiration of marine animals on a Greenland expedition, learned to like seal meat ("sweet, different, not fishy").

In Copenhagen the Kroghs have their living quarters in the same building with their laboratory, which makes it convenient to get to dinner from work and back to work after dinner. He drinks a lot of Carlsberg beer, more from a sense of duty than for any other reason, for the profits of this famed Copenhagen brewery go solely to support institutions of science and art. He could get no Carlsberg beer in Swarthmore last week, because in that pious Quaker town no beer, however philanthropic, is sold.