Nobelmen

GEORGE HOYT WHIPPLE

GEORGE RICHARDS MINOT

WILLIAM PARRY MURPHY

Last week these three names were the most resounding in World Medicine. Their owners, U. S. doctors all, had just been jointly awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Medicine. They earned that highest of earthly distinctions for discovering that a diet of animal livers is a specific remedy, although no permanent cure, for pernicious anemia. The fourth, fifth and sixth U. S. medical investigators to receive the Nobel Prize,* they raise the U. S. medical score to match Germany's. Racily American were the responses of last week's Nobelmen to the news.

Dr. Whipple: "I'm flabbergasted."

Dr. Minot: "I'm very happy."

Dr. Murphy: "I'm flabbergasted."

In December they expect to take their wives and children to Stockholm to receive Kroner 54.202.64 (about $13,935) each and their certificates of Nobel Laureateship.

Dr. Whipple, 56, is dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry. A lean, alert man who takes pride in his full head of hair and would like "to take to the woods until the fuss is over," he hinted last week that he would give a large part of his prize money to his assistants in the anemia research: Mrs. Frieda Saur Robscheit Robbins, John C. Moreau, Doris Huxley, Marie Callahan.

Dr. Minot, 49, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Now that doctors know how to palliate pernicious anemia, he said, he will spend his share of the prize money hunting for the cause and definitive cure of the disease.

Dr. Murphy, 42, is an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Sitting with shoulders hunched, chest pushed in, fingers pressed thoughtfully together, he said that now he could afford to devote himself intensively to the problems of agranulocytosis, a disease during which the marrow of the long bones ceases to throw white blood cells into the arteries.

Drs. Whipple, Minot and Murphy hit upon liver as a remedy for pernicious anemia by different routes.

Dr. Whipple, a pathologist before he became a dean, studied the regeneration of blood in secondary anemia, the transient bloodlessness which may follow an accident or accompany a disease like tuberculosis. In this study Dr. Whipple bled dogs almost lifeless, then fed them various stuffs. Animal and fowl livers caused the speediest recoveries from this artificial secondary anemia. Next in usefulness were kidneys, sweetbreads, apricots, peaches, prunes. Practically useless were fish livers (otherwise precious for Vitamin D), bread, cereals, milk, cheese.

Dr. Minot simultaneously and separately sought the cause and mechanism of pernicious anemia. The cause is still unknown. But Dr. Minot determined that in pernicious anemia the marrow in the long bones of the arms and legs break down in its job of making red blood cells. This breakdown has nothing to do with the marrow's associated duty of manufacturing white blood cells. In granulopenia, for example, where white cell production ceases, red cell production goes right on (TIME, June 25). In leucemia, the marrow produces a superabundance of white cells, which stifle their red cousins, cause death (TIME, May 21).

An attack of diabetes in 1921 gave Dr. Minot the clue to liver as the stuff which would best regenerate the marrow's red-cell powers. Before Drs. Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best of the University of Toronto discovered insulin (1921), Dr. Minot kept himself alive by watching his diet. Dieting made him a food faddist. Faddism made him ask his pernicious anemia patients what they ate. Thus he discovered that most never touched meat or green vegetables. From Johns Hopkins' Dr. Elmer Verner McCollum, Dr. Minot learned that liver was rich in proteins and vitamins which stimulate the growth of children.

About that time (1924) Dr. Minot learned from Dr. Whipple, who soon became "my closest friend," about the effect of liver on secondary anemia. So with some confidence and Dr. Murphy's constant help, Dr. Minot began to feed pernicious anemics with liver. The results were too miraculous for hasty announcement. Drs. Minot and Murphy, with proper salute to Dr. Whipple, made their formal announcement in 1926.

Soon biochemists were able to substitute liver extracts for cooked liver. A little later biochemists learned to extract a quintessence which could be administered with a hypodermic needle.

Then Harvard's Dr. William Bosworth Castle discovered why liver helped anemics. Pernicious anemia, he showed, is a deficiency disease in a category with diabetes and myxedema. In pernicious anemia the stomach fails to secrete a certain substance which as yet has not been isolated. Ordinarily that stomach secretion mixes with food, especially meats, and produces a second, unidentified substance in the intestines. There the second unknown is absorbed and gets to the arm and leg bones where it stimulates the production of red blood cells.

Liver only stays death from pernicious anemics. However, with $14,000 practically in his hands to pay for further research, Dr. Minot could confidently proclaim last week: "We are on the track of a cure, a complete and final cure."

* The others: Rockefeller Institute's Alexis Carrel (1912) and Karl Landsteiner (1930); California Institute of Technology's Thomas Hunt Morgan (1933).

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