Citizen Doctor

This week the conscience of U.S. science, in the person of a chunky Chicago physiologist named Andrew Conway Ivy, took off for Nu"rnberg. He is to represent U.S. scientists at the trial of 23 Nazi doctors for high crimes against Science--and against Humanity.

The U.S. could hardly have chosen better. From his scrubby grey mustache to his trotting gait, Dr. Ivy is as American as baseball.

He was born in Farmington, Mo., was educated at a Missouri normal school, the University of Chicago, Rush Medical College, made his college wrestling team and Phi Beta Kappa. Like many another successful medico, he is part researcher, part executive, part salesman.

At the University of Illinois, where he works, he supports the back-breaking title of Vice President in Charge of Chicago Professional Colleges and Distinguished Professor of Physiology. He has a homely, unpretentious philosophy: "To make a comfortable living [$18,000 a year] while making living comfortable for other people."

Fields for Research. Dr. Ivy's colleagues consider him one of the nation's top physiqlogists. He is an expert on stomach ulcers (TIME, April 28, 1941), aviation medicine (TIME, Oct. 6, 1941), cancer (TIME, Dec. 16, 1946), analgesia (pain killers), gall-bladder and liver complaints, diseases of old age. His proudest achievement: discovery of a hormone which he thinks shows promise as a stomach-ulcer cure (the hormone: enterogastrone, extracted from hog intestines).

When Ivy transferred to the University of Illinois from Northwestern last fall, he insisted on freedom to putter in his laboratory. At Illinois, he is working (with 20 research assistants) on at least a dozen projects, including a "physical environment" laboratory to study effects of cold and high altitude, an institute on the diseases of old age, research on the kidney, on electrical treatment of infantile paralysis.

But to Andrew Ivy, medicine is partly "missionary" work. Much of this work is done in Washington, where he is almost as well known as in Chicago (he was a medical consultant to both the Army and Navy during the war). He has big plans for national cancer research, has pestered capital politicos for a good many months to put up the money. With his great & good friend, the University of Chicago's world-famed physiologist Anton J. ("Ajax") Carlson, he has for years fought a determined battle against anti-vivisectionists.

Man at Work. Though Ivy once announced, in a learned paper on The Physiology of Work, that "one day's rest in seven is essential," he himself works seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day. He rises at 6, is at work by 7:30 (he drives so fast that Chicago police have lost count of the number of times they have stopped him).

He sees all callers, takes all phone calls himself, pops in & out of his laboratories, serves as a one-man medical information bureau for newsmen, lectures to classes, women's clubs and anyone else who will hear him (once he even addressed an accountants' meeting). On occasion, he has trotted round to Chicago slaughterhouses to extract enterogastrone from hog intestines himself. He lunches and dines in his laboratory on homemade sandwiches and warmed-over coffee (which he says he prefers to fresh). In spare moments, he writes scientific papers; at 53, he has published more than 750.

Two evenings a week Dr. Ivy reserves for his family--his physiologist wife Emma and five boys. One is an Army doctor, three are in medical school, the fifth in high school.

Study in Horror. Last summer, kindly Dr. Ivy had the shock of his busy life. Given the job of investigating Nazi medical "science," he went to Germany, came back with a horrified report. Items:

P: Human beings were killed to provide skeletons for the collection of an anthropological museum.

P: Nazi doctors cut organs out of healthy prisoners to demonstrate surgery to students.

&182; They injected virulent typhus, tuberculosis and gas-gangrene germs to try various treatments.

P: They tried (unsuccessfully) to transplant human legs and other human organs.

P: They shortened legs and arms by cutting out sections of bone to see how much bone could be removed without crippling the subject.

To practical Dr. Ivy, these experiments were shocking not only because of their inhumanity, but because they 1) undermined the prestige and dignity of science; 2) had diverted German scientists from useful work (virtually no knowledge of value was gained from their macabre studies).

As a medical missionary, and a humanitarian, he protested against what the Germans had done, and laid down a broad principle that might well apply to all scientific study. Said he: "The basic moral issue is . . . that the indirect effects [of research] on the public and the experimenters are not such as to promote a spirit of inhumanity or cruelty."

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