Football & Leucocytes

Harvard's footballers last year did something that no others did. Before each game some of them would assemble with their Captain William Barry Wood Jr. and jab sharp needles into their thumbs or earlobes. Drops of crimson Harvard blood were smeared on slides. During the game and afterwards, the same thing would happen. Most Harvardmen knew that Captain Wood, quarterback. Phi Beta Kappa, student council president, first marshal of the Class of 1932, was plugging away at biochemistry, studying for medical school, working a good part of his time in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory. He wrote a thesis which won him summa cum laude honors at graduation and which, when published in Germany, was called one of the most brilliant pieces of original research ever done in Harvard's biochemistry department. Not until last week was it generally known what Student Wood was getting at. In studying footballers' blood counts he was investigating the increase of leucocytes (white corpuscles) which occurs during muscular exertion and in certain forms of local infections.

A droll little mite is the leucocyte, scooting here & there, sending out inquisitive pseudopodia (prolongations) as does the amoeba. Policeman of the blood stream, it scavenges waste, destroys certain bacteria, ignoring some and gobbling others with gusto. Pus is compounded of dead bacteria, dead leucocytes. It is well known that the leucocyte count is high in infancy and old age, decreasing in between. Massage, exercise, eating proteins increase it; fasting lowers it. In such infections as pneumonia and appendicitis the white cells rush to the defense of the infected tissue, are replaced by peculiar polymorphonuclear-neutrophile cells, called "band-form" from their appearance under the microscope. The relation between these "band-form" cells and the other white cells was what interested Student Wood and his collaborator, Research Assistant Harold Thomas Edwards.

They discovered that in infection "band-form" cells sometimes increase as much as 25%. But in muscular exertion the increase is all in the ordinary white cells. Leucocytes furnished a good yardstick of energy production and exhaustion. Comparing one form of athletics with another disclosed that football is the most strenuous of all, with the possible exception of the 25-mi. marathon. During two hours of football, the ball is actually in motion only eight minutes. In that time the player burns up energy at top speed. Researchers Wood and Edwards discovered that the average leucocyte increase is nearly 300%. But whence the leucocytes come and whither they go, no man knows yet.

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