Flea

A transparent water flea called Daphnia magna has had a lot of flattering things said about it by Professor Arno Viehoever of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science. "This little animal has a divine simplicity that is miraculous," Professor Viehoever never tires of telling. "It is seemingly a primitive form of life until studied. Its fundamental biological responses are very similar to ours. It has nervous, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, optic and reproductive systems, and the beauty of it is that the animal is perfectly transparent so you can see everything that is happening, from the digestion of its food and the beating of its heart to the working of its eye."

Daphnia, a one-fourth inch relative of lobsters and crabs, can live in ten drops of water. It is small enough for its whole body to be studied through a microscope and transparent enough to be projected upon a magic lantern screen (see cut, p. 32). These qualities make Daphnia a fine biological subject on which to test drugs, Professor Viehoever recently realized. For Professor Viehoever, Daphnia solved an important strychnine puzzle, he enthusiastically told the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Denver this week. This bitter, crystalline product of nux vomica is used as a tonic, stimulant and antidote in medicine. The effects of strychnine have long been unpredictable, even when the drug is manufactured strictly according to the U. S. Pharmacopeia. After diligent tests on rats, manufacturing druggists gave up hope of producing an utterly reliable strychnine. But Professor Viehoever tried many brands of the drug on Daphnia and in every instance he produced identical convulsions, paralysis, death. Good strychnine, he concluded, is invariable. The trouble lies with the people, animals and insects who react variously to the drug.

Professor Viehoever is as interesting as Daphnia. He is a terror to his family, who never know what noisome creature or substance he may pull from his pockets. The U. S. entered the War a few weeks before he, a German, could become naturalized. Nevertheless, he continued to work for the U. S. Bureau of Chemistry at the University of Illinois. Back in Washington, he composed The Doughboys March, which the U. S. Army band at Fort Washington, Md., near where he has a farm and summer home, still plays. Professor Viehoever's laboratory, where a pet white kitten dabbles in his bowls of Daphnia, is in a red-brick house next to the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science's garden. He likes to recall that this garden, surrounded by a high spiked fence, was planted by the late Dr. Frederick B. Kilmer, a trustee of the college and father of the poet who wrote Trees.

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