Steps Forward

For five days last week in Detroit's Masonic Temple, 3,500 topflight physiologists, biochemists, pharmacologists, pathologists, nutritionists and immunologists talked about new developments in medicine. Highlights at the meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology:

Another First. Dr. Choh Hao Li, 36-year-old Chinese-born University of California biochemist, reported success in isolating for the first time the sex hormone FSH (for follicle-stimulating hormone). In the female, FSH stimulates the growth of follicles in the ovary and makes ovulation possible; in the male, it stimulates tubules in the testes that produce sperm. Dr. Li isolated it from the pituitary glands of freshly killed sheep. Since other researchers were looking for it, too, Dr. Li says: "I was damn lucky. I hit on the right method." With the same sort of "luck," he was also the first to isolate four other hormones, including ACTH. More work will have to be done on FSH before it can be tried on humans as a cure for some forms of infertility.

Safer Blood. Stockpiling whole blood and plasma is now known to be risky: some recipients get a serious liver disease called homologous serum jaundice. One donor who carries the jaundice virus in his blood might infect a pool given by 5,000 donors. Drs. Frank W. Hartman and George H. Mangun of Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital think they have found a way to sterilize the blood and kill the virus without making the blood harmful or useless. They have used nitrogen mustard, a war gas, and are now experimenting with a chemical called dimethyl sulphate. To prove the process safe, Dr. Hartman subjected himself to three transfusions. He felt all right afterward. Then he gave sterilized plasma to several hundred patients; none got jaundice (untreated blood that contains the virus causes jaundice in 5% to 7% of patients).

Stronger Drug. A new drug for such allergies as hay fever, hives and asthma was announced by a six-woman, two-man team headed by Dr. Richard Tislow of Schering Corp.'s laboratories in Bloomfield, NJ. The drug is called Chlor-Trimeton. In experiments on animals it proved to be 50 times as strong as some drugs now used to combat histamine (the substance thought to be released in the body as part of allergic reactions). But its strength did not cause a corresponding increase in unpleasant effects, and it lasted much longer. Chlor-Trimeton is now being tried on human patients, may soon be available on doctors' prescriptions.

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