Points for the Virus Theory

Medical investigators have good reason for suspecting that viruses may cause many common and baffling disorders of the human nervous system, to say nothing of some forms of cancer. But indicting the culprits has proved to be incredibly difficult. Most of the diseases--such as multiple sclerosis, the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that killed Lou Gehrig, parkinsonism, and perhaps myasthenia gravis--do not normally attack animals, so it is next to impossible to study them in the laboratory.

Now, with patience and prodigious efforts extending halfway around the world, researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness have managed to inject lab animals with kuru, or "laughing death," an especially mystifying disease of the nervous system that has decimated Fore tribesmen in eastern New Guinea (TIME, Nov. 11, 1957). Eiro, a 13-year-old Fore boy, died of kuru in his New Guinea highland village in September, 1962. A visiting doctor did an autopsy; he took tissue from Eire's brain, froze it, put it in liquid nitrogen at -- 70DEGC., and shipped it to Bethesda, Md.

There, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek and his colleagues made an extract of the brain material and injected it into the brains of monkeys and a two-year-old chimpanzee named Georgette. Nothing happened to the monkeys, and for 20 months Georgette kept on growing like a normal chimp. Then, last May, Georgette became apathetic and lethargic. Her lower lip drooped, and she shivered at the slightest chill. Soon, she was staggering and stumbling as she walked; if she reached for a banana, she missed it. When she could hardly move her limbs and screamed at the gentlest touch, the researchers resorted to mercy killing. A chimpanzee injected with material from another Fore victim's brain developed the same symptoms. Now there have been two more.

The disease in chimpanzees, Dr. Gajdusek reports in Nature, seems essentially the same as kuru in man, except that the animals could not suffer impairment of speech or bouts of maniacal laughter. This evidence, plus data from a similar disease of sheep, called scrapie, strongly suggests that the virus theory is correct. In any case, the ability to reproduce such a disease in animals should aid neurological research.

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