Lina & the Brain

In League of Nations days, scientists who visited Geneva knew her as a plump, black-eyed Russian physiologist named Lina Stern. She loved to putter in her laboratory all day and dance all night. A brilliant scientist, Lina was already a full professor (of physiological chemistry) at the University of Geneva. Friend of many a globe-trotting academician, she spoke fluent Russian, French and English. In 1925, fun-loving Physiologist Stern decided to go to Moscow, where, she said, she could pursue science in "a society built on scientific principles."

Last week Dr. Lina Stern was once again on international view. The Soviet Government handed out photographs of her to the world's press, along with a few carefully chosen words about her career. Grey now and 69, Dr. Stern is a woman of consequence in the U.S.S.R. She holds the Stalin Prize for scientific accomplishment, is director of the Moscow Institute of Physiology and half a dozen other research enterprises, has nearly 300 scientific publications to her credit. She can boast the standard trappings of a top-rank Russian scientist: a fine laboratory of her own, a big automobile, the right to take a Black Sea vacation.

Lina Stern's specialty is the physiology of the brain and central nervous system. U.S. doctors who have studied her solid, imaginative work agree that her discoveries may well be a milestone in the treatment of shock, tetanus, high blood pressure and many other disorders involving the central nervous system. Her method differs in technique and purpose from intraspinal injections used in the U.S.

Around the Filter. For a long time, Dr. Stern worried over a basic medical problem: why is it that certain medicines and serums injected into the blood stream do not get through to the brain nerve centers? Intravenous injections of anti-tetanus serum, for example, fail to check tetanus once the poison gets into the central nervous system. Dr. Stern decided that there must be a barrier (a filtering membrane), developed to protect the nerves and spinal fluid from harmful substances and most germs. She called this block the "hematoencephalic barrier."

To get around the barrier, thought Dr. Stern, why not inject medicines directly into the nerve centers in the brain? She first tried this dangerous experiment on dogs, got some astonishing results. Calcium solutions, injected into the blood stream in large doses, act as stimulants. When Dr. Stern injected a few drops of a calcium salt solution into a dog's brain, the effect was exactly opposite to the one expected: instead of being stimulated, the dog tottered, collapsed, in a few minutes fell fast asleep. When she injected potassium phosphate, the dog had a case of frenzied jitters for 30 minutes.

Into the Nerves. Might a brain injection of this solution revive a dying patient with low blood pressure, weak pulse and feeble breathing? During World War II, Dr. Stern gave brain injections to shock victims given up for dead. The treatment was a dramatic success: of the first 383 "hopeless" cases, 302 recovered. By war's end, the treatment was standard in many Soviet hospitals.

Dr. Stern proceeded to try brain injections (of vitamins, sedatives, medicines, etc.) for many other ailments, got good results against tetanus, ulcers, skin diseases, inflammation of the brain, insanity.

Lina Stern thinks her theory probably also explains the physiology of anger. An angry man, she notes, sometimes calms down all of a sudden. Why? When anger-stimulating adrenalin in the blood passes a certain concentration, it breaks through the hematoencephalic barrier into the brain, reverses its effect: the barrier thus serves as a sort of safety valve. Says Stern: "It keeps a man from--what do you say?--from blowing his top."

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