Medicine: Pushbutton Diagnosis?

With the practice of medicine becoming increasingly technical, some doctors dream of a day when an electronic brain might take the place of the physician in diagnosing obscure ills. Last week Dr. Winston H. Price told colleagues in the Johns Hopkins Medical Society of some toddling first steps toward developing such a wonderful widget.

Like many other scientists, Biochemist (no M.D.) Price believes that substances in the blood should be indicators of health and disease. But where many recent researchers have relied on enzymes for diagnosis (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957), Price picked the mucoproteins, a little-understood group of complex chemicals in which a sugarlike substance is combined with a protein. Almost the only thing known about them is that their composition changes when tissues are damaged. Price took a standard (but highly complex) fractionator. Into it he put 4 cc. (one teaspoon) of serum from the blood of his test subjects. After the machine had dropped the various fractions into an array of test tubes, he put the tubes under the spectrophotometer for analysis.

From healthy subjects, Dr. Price got virtually identical patterns. From those with rheumatic fever he got a different pattern. From tuberculosis victims it was different again, and so on down a long list of physical and mental illnesses, including cancer and various heart diseases. Though hopeful, Dr. Price and colleagues were cautious. It will probably take five years to decide whether the telltale test tubes are truthful, and whether they tell the same story to different physicians reading the results.