Hard-Boiled Nerves

Hard-Boiled Nerves

Like a crescent moon through a fog, the tenuous edge of a great physiological discovery appeared at Cornell University last week. Professor Wilder Dwight Bancroft, authoritative student of colloid chemistry, and Dr. G. Holmes Richter, research fellow, have been using an ultramicroscope on living sensory nerves.

They have seen anesthetics making the water-clear nerve cells become first cloudy, then coagulated like the white of a hard-boiled egg. When the anesthetic wears off, the nerve cells resume their original water-clearness. Alcohol affects the nerves similarly. So do narcotics.

But when nerves are drugged repeatedly they lose their recuperative powers. Increasingly large bits of the coagulation remain. Those bits cause a nervous irritation which only more of the drug (alcohol, narcotics) can allay--explanation of the addict's craving.

Drs. Bancroft and Richter have sought some chemical which would peptize (digest, dissolve) the hard-boiled nerve contents but not injure other parts of the cells or of the body. Last week they cautiously said: "In the light of laboratory experiments, not yet ready for publication, we seem to have hit upon some-thing which promises favorable results."

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