Leprosy Assailed

Leprologists rejoiced to learn last week that the leprosy germ has at last and repeatedly been grown in laboratory dishes. Possible ultimate control of the scourge is therefore in sight. The men who accomplished the feat are Professor Malcolm Herman Soule, University of Michigan bacteriologist, and Professor Earl Baldwin McKinley, dean of George Washington Medical school. Both are advisers to the Leonard Wood Memorial.*

First success in growing the leprosy germ artificially came after Professors McKinley and Soule placed the germs in a special atmosphere of carbon dioxide and oxygen. The youngest of 16 generations of germs grown that way were potent enough to cause what looked like leprosy in laboratory monkeys. Professor McKinley here diverged and with the help of Professor Adah Elizabeth Verder of George Washington University grew another crop of germs in minced chicken embryo under ordinary atmosphere. New generations developed in seven to ten days and accelerated efforts to produce immunization agents. Eventually the investigators hope to devise a skin test for leprosy which will make detection of that disease as simple and as certain as the present skin tests for tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever.

With this hope in mind. Professor McKinley last week went to Europe for vacation. Professor Soule at the same time left for the new Leonard Wood Memorial leprosy laboratory at Culion, Philippine Islands.

*While Governor of the Philippines the late Major General Leonard Wood, who had been a doctor before he became a soldier, started to raise a $2,000,000 fund to eradicate leprosy, which afflicts the Philippines.

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