Sensational Serum

Russian science has reported another medical sensation: a serum which stimulates or inhibits the life processes of living tissue. The Russian scientists claim that the serum hastens wound healing, mends broken bones more quickly, increases the body's defenses against infection and cancer, may enable man to live to be 125 years old.

Born in Jail. Professor Alexander Alexandrovitch Bogomoletz, who has worked on the serum for more than 18 years, is a physiologist and pathologist of very high international standing. He is director of Kiev's Institute for Experimental Biology and Pathology which, until the Nazis got there, was one of the best equipped laboratories in the world. Since 1930 he has been president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. When the Germans came, he moved from Kiev (he was born in jail there in 1881, while his mother was a political prisoner) to Ufa in the Urals. This month he will move back. Because of his serum, which he calls "anti-reticular-cytotoxic serum" and mercifully abbreviates to ACS, the professor was decorated last week with the Order of Lenin and the Hammer & Sickle Gold Medal, received the rank of Hero of Socialist Labor.

Marrow from Human Corpses. The serum is not new to the Russians. Famed Professor Elie Metchnikoff was working on a similar serum back in 1900. ACS was used experimentally on animals until about 1936. Then it was tried out on human patients. To acquaint U.S. doctors with this work, the latest issue of the American Review of Soviet Medicine carries three articles on ACS, including one by Professor Bogomoletz. Some highlights:

P:ACS is usually made by injecting horses with cells from the spleens and bone marrow (bloodmaking tissues) of human corpses, preferably young, healthy people who died by accident. The final product is an extract of the horses' blood.

P:The healing dose is "measured by the 100th parts of a cubic centimeter" of ACS, injected under a patient's skin or into a vein. Two doses may last a lifetime. Large doses are harmful and are never used. Minute amounts make tissue activity speed up. Professor Bogomoletz believes that probable longevity goes with each dose, no matter for what reason it is given.

P:ACS is not a specific. It merely assists other treatments.

As a Match to a Fire. Professor Bogomoletz' description of ACS's complex action in the body reads like one of Professor Einstein's "simplifications" of his theory. The serum's effects begin to show about the time of the second dose. First signs: 1) increased ability of blood substances to enter cells; 2) dilated capillaries; 3) a rise in lymphocytes (a kind of white blood corpuscle). Three or four hours later, a second stage begins, during which lymphocytes decrease and monocytes (another kind of white corpuscle) multiply and migrate from the blood into the solid tissue. Cells and blood begin increased production of enzymes (digestive substances), opsonins (blood substance which makes bacteria an easy prey for fighter cells), and other protective materials. "I would compare the action of our serum," says the professor, "with the action of a match causing a conflagration."

The Russian doctors are convinced that ACS can1) reduce the severity of typhus, childbed fever and other serious infections, 2) "save many thousands of years in human life annually" by preventing recurrence of cancer after operation, 3) help schizophrenic and other insane patients, probably by improving the health of nerve fibers, 4) fight rheumatism ("against acute arthritis it is a quick and certain cure"), hardening of the arteries and several other chronic diseases, 5) speed healing of wounds, burns, frostbite injuries. But they warn that ACS is harmful in certain heart diseases.

Widespread Success. When the war came, ACS was immediately put to use. Injections have become so general that proud Professor Bogomoletz last week told a Red Star reporter that "at present, the anti-reticular-cytotoxic serum has been widely and successfully used in all hospitals and clinics for curing the consequences of war injuries." Red Star carried stories about men now at the front who would have been legless or armless but for ACS. The professor says the serum does not cost much and is easy to make (Russia made 3,000,000 doses in 1943); he recommends that Russia's allies use it for bullet-caused fractures.

Confronted with these astounding claims, bemused U.S. doctors last week would not commit themselves because, to them, much Russian research seems intuitive rather than logical--the average Russian scientist often prefers to work things out in his head without resort to guinea pigs. U.S. doctors reluctantly admit that he often comes out with the right answer, but they want to be shown. U.S. research on ACS has already begun.

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