Of Whales & Glands

Of Whales & Glands "[He is] gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming as to defy all present pursuit from man," wrote Herman Melville of the finback whale. "This leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race." Captain Ahab and his men felt the same way, concentrated on other, slower beasts (notably the sperm whale, a species to which Moby Dick himself belonged). But today, with steam power and steel cables, the "unconquerable Cains" of the ocean, the fin and the blue whales,* are hunted vigorously--and among the most interested hunters is modern medicine.

One twilit night last week when eight bells sounded midnight aboard the British factory whaling ship Southern Venturer, breasting the sullen swells of the Antarctic Ocean, it meant "They're off!" The 1957 whaling season was officially open. All hands were ready for the first leviathan. Soon from over the leaden horizon came one of the mother ship's brood of smaller ships, towing a monstrous fin whale by its tail. Then began a mechanized dissection such as Melville did not imagine even in his most tortured dreams.

Off with His Head. Drawn up the gaping skidway by steel cables thrumming on giant steam-driven winches, the whale reached the broad afterdeck. A gang of workmen, wielding long-handled flensing knives, sliced off the thick blubber in foot-wide strips. The winches whined again and dragged the naked, bloody carcass 50 ft. farther along the slimy, slippery, half-iced deck to stage two. Here another flensing gang sliced off the meat. A neat, well-directed blow, as from an executioner's ax, severed the backbone at the neck, and the gigantic head (20 ft. long in an average 60-ft. whale) was dragged to the foredeck.

There Magnus Andersen, 41, a stocky, white-haired Norwegian, stood by with a 12-ft. steam-driven saw. "The winch pulls head right dead in front of my saw," as Andersen describes his work. "I say 'Woh!' when the part I want for first cut is opposite my blade. It is just behind the middle of head. I turn down saw, zuff-zuff, then I stop saw. nip in quick and grab the gland--messy purple and hard like rock--on edge of brain. I grab, twist and pull like hell."

The gland that calls forth Magnus Andersen's specialized skill is the pituitary, whose function was unknown in Melville's day. Today medicine knows the pituitary as a master gland in the body's complex and delicately balanced hormonal system; it secretes, among others, the master hormone ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), which regulates activity of the adrenal glands astride the kidneys.

Bigger Than Pigs. To find the whale's gland in a 20-ft. head, Andersen must show uncanny judgment, for a misplaced stroke of the saw could slash through the pituitary itself. In 1956 Andersen retrieved 871 pituitaries from 898 blue and fin whales, got a bonus of half a bottle of rum for every 50 glands. (On other ships, an estimated 30,000 more whale pituitaries were gathered.) An average season's catch of pituitaries will bring the owners of one ship little more than $2,000, but says a spokesman, "our policy is waste not, want not--particularly for medical purposes."

Another source of ACTH is the tiny hog pituitaries (generally used in the U.S.), but it takes half a dozen of them to make a single average medical dose. The worldwide demand for the hormone is now so great that many manufacturers are turning to the far larger whale glands --the size of an egg. Melville's pelagic Cain now helps to supply doctors with a valued treatment for at least 30 diseases, from common and crippling rheumatoid arthritis to scleroderma.

* The blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived--up to 100 It.. 150 tons. The finback reaches 80 ft. and 100 tons.

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