Mark of Merit

From his neat, gold-rimmed spectacles, reassuring pipe, and dignified classroom smile, Eugene DuBois is easily spotted as a professor. It is harder to guess that he is an outstanding physiologist whose researches made possible medicine's standard basal metabolism test.

In Atlantic City last week, the exclusive (225 members) Association of American Physicians took signal note of Dr. DuBois' work by awarding him the Kober Medal. Before it hands out its only award, the Association thinks not twice but many times: among past winners have been such famed medical men as George Minot, William Welch and Theobald Smith.

Eugene DuBois (rhymes with new choice) got interested in the fuel-consumption processes of the body in 1911, when medicine was just waking up to the interrelation between physiological processes and disease. He and famed Physiologist Graham Lusk were the first in the U.S. to use the calorimeter (a device that measures the output of body heat) on human subjects. The modern basal metabolism test, which measures the rate of body processes by measuring oxygen consumption, is a lineal descendant of the DuBois calorimeter.

His early work dealt a heavy blow to the old wives' injunction, "feed a cold and starve a fever." He found that as body temperature rises above normal (fever), the rate of metabolism goes up rapidly; thus more rather than less fuel (food) is needed. During World War II, as a Navy captain, he put his knowledge to work by helping to develop the airman's "G-suit" and electrically heated clothing. At the moment, as head of the Physiology Department at Cornell Medical College, he is trying to find out why women who wear open-toed shoes don't catch their deaths in winter.

His ex-students insist that Eugene DuBois is as great a teacher as he is a physiologist. His educational secret, they say, is the old but sound one: he works with his students instead of over them.

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