Medicine: Soviet Drug Research

If the Russians can achieve their goal in drug research they will be, in effect, ten feet tall by 1960. This is suggested by an article in the Moscow journal, Pharmacology and Toxicology, about the Soviets' five-year plan (1956-60) for pharmacological research. A major aim of the Soviet plan, as translated last week by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is to develop "pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work." In plain English, the Russians are looking for drugs like the "psychic energizers" foreseen by New York's Dr. Nathan S. Kline (TIME, Feb. 24), that will make them supermen.

The report on the drug plan, passed on by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, also reviewed the previous five-year period, during which Soviet researchers devoted the bulk of their effort to treating disease, especially emotional disorders, with prolonged sleep. This has not paid off too well, the anonymous authors of the plan conceded. Prolonged, drug-induced sleep "cannot be used as a universal therapeutic measure," partly because sometimes the cure is worse than the disease-it causes fever or anemia.

In the same five-year period, the Reds reported, they produced many new drugs, including some antibiotic-most of them unrecognizable to NIH experts under the names given. Of the identifiable items, several had been developed earlier in the U.S. Concluded the Soviet report: "As regards the high level of [Russian] scientific research, it stands above the pharmacology of foreign countries, although, as regards the discovery of new and effective medicinal substances, it still lags behind the large capitalistic states."