Prizemen

Again last week the Stockholm Academy of Medicine awarded a Nobel Prize: jointly to Professor Sir Charles Scott Sherrington of Oxford and Professor Edgar Douglas Adrian of Cambridge, for their separate but complementary studies of nerves. Both are experimental physiologists. Professor Sherrington never practiced medicine. Professor Adrian practiced only during the War when lack of physicians forced him into a London hospital.

Whether Professor Sherrington or Russia's Professor Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1904 Nobel Laureate in Medicine) is the world's greatest physiologist is one of those useless points scholars like to discuss. Neurologists argue for Professor Sherrington. Harvard's Harvey Gushing defers to him, his laboratory at Oxford is a shrine. Everyone who meets him, who hears his quiet elucidation of the abstruse, becomes his friend. His researches laid the foundations of our present knowledge of reflex actions. His Integrative Action of the Nervous System is practically an engineering manual of the body's telegraph system. When a person wants to crook his finger, nerves carry the decision to the appropriate muscles. When he wishes to straighten the finger, other nerves carry the decision to the other set of muscles concerned. Professor Sherrington discovered that during either of these movements the inactive muscles are not merely passively relaxed, but are actually inhibited so that they are slacker than when the finger is at rest. By such systematic studies he has made neurology a highly scientific, probably the most scientific and dependable, subdivision of Medicine. At 71, loaded with a dozen nations' honors, he is extraordinarily plain and humble. For avocation he writes poetry.

Professor Adrian, 43, is a brisker, more active individual. He climbs mountains (Mt. Blanc last year), rides a bicycle the mile between his Cambridge home and laboratory. When he is working or otherwise preoccupied he is inclined to be irritable and abrupt, especially with slow students. But with his associates, particularly those who are interested in his field, he bubbles with enthusiasm and information. He too has a portfolio of international honors given for his studies of nerve conduction. His most delicate work has been to separate the microscopic, floss-like fibres which constitute a nerve and splice them into a highly sensitive telegraph set. Whenever such nerves carry messages to (or from) the brain by means of very weak electrical impulses, amplifying tubes in Professor Adrian's device magnify those impulses until he can record them on a phonograph disk or send them sounding from a loud speaker. Magnified, they sound like barks. Professor Adrian understands the noises. A slow, long continued series of barks, for example, may indicate the pain of a burn or ulcer.

The Sherrington-Adrian award gave Great Britain a score of six Nobel Prizes in Medicine, against the two for the U. S. Previous Britons: the late Sir Ronald Ross (1902), Archibald Vivian Hill (1922), John James Rickard Macleod (1923, while at Toronto), Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1929). The U. S. Nobelmen: French-born Alexis Carrel (1912), Austrian-born Karl Landsteiner (1930).

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