Life from a Lifer?

The convict and the girl whose life he may save never saw each other. The prisoner, 49, serving a life term for murder in New York State's Sing Sing prison, lay under guard in a ward in Ossining Hospital, on a hill overlooking the high-walled prison. The eight-year-old girl was in a private room in the same building. She was near death from leukemia, the cancer-like disease of the blood-making system for which no cure is known. Manhattan Hematologist Harry Wallerstein took the child to Ossining because he knew that prisoners there were willing to volunteer as guinea pigs for medical experiments.* Chief Prison Physician Charles C. Sweet had no trouble finding a man willing to take a chance, although he offered no rewards.

The doctors began by taking half a pint of blood from the sick girl, and transferring it in a standard vacuum blood container to the veins of the convict. Next, they took a pint of his blood, gave it to her. Then the exchange was made pint-for-pint for four days (a five-hour session each day) until a total of 9,000 cubic centimeters (18 pints) had been interchanged. Last week, the transfer over, the lifer went back to his cell, the girl to her Manhattan home.

The theory behind the exchange: there may be some factor in normal blood that combats leukemia; it might work on the bone marrow, source of the abnormal, immature cells, or it might work on the cells themselves. The doctors hoped to increase this suspected factor X in the convict's bloodstream by giving it extra work to do in fighting the child's leukemia. It was the first such experiment on human beings, although transfusions of normal blood are standard practice for leukemia victims as a life-prolonging measure. One difficulty had been getting a donor willing to exchange his normal blood for leukemic blood.

At week's end, tests of the convict's blood and bone marrow (from the sternum or breastbone) showed nothing abnormal. Doctors believed that he would stay free of the disease, but tests would continue for a year. The girl seemed a little better, but it was much too early to tell whether the Sing Sing experiment was a new milestone in the fight against leukemia or just another baffling failure.

* During World War II, prisoners volunteered to test the possible poisonous qualities of the antimalaria drug atabrine.

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