The Hip Doctor

After Maria Gambarelli had her arthritic right hip joint repaired in 1961, she was so incapacitated that her career as a ballet dancer and teacher came to a halt. But last year she underwent a hip-joint replacement to correct the problems that persisted after the first operation. Since then she has recovered so completely that she has taken up teaching ballet again. Last week, at a Manhattan news conference, she demonstrated her renewed ability to perform classical ballet movements. "I feel like a marvelous car," she said. "They have put in a new part, and I am like a brand-new Cadillac or Rolls-Royce."

The occasion was the granting of a major medical award to the man who made possible her recovery and that of thousands of others: British Surgeon John Charnley, 63, who last week won the Albert and Mary Lasker Award for clinical research ($10,000) for developing the modern artificial hip joint.

Charnley, a surgeon at England's Wrightington Hospital in Wigan, was not the first physician to replace part of the hip's ball-and-socket joint. Doctors had long been substituting a stainless-steel ball for the head of the femur, or thighbone. But even after the introduction of better bone cements eliminated one problem--the tendency of the new head to work loose--the results of the operation were often unsatisfactory. Because body fluids provided inadequate lubrication and even corroded the implants, friction between the ball and its socket caused both to wear.

Charnley began to search for materials that would require no lubrication. He first tried Teflon, but the material tended to wear badly in the hip joint. Then he made a serendipitous discovery. Although Charnley had turned away a salesman who tried to interest him in high-density polyethylene, his laboratory assistant, eager to use idle test apparatus, tried four samples of the tough plastic. The material tested so successfully that in 1962, Charnley adopted it for hip sockets.

Until Charnley, victims of advanced arthritis or injuries to the hip were often permanently crippled. Now, in the U.S. alone, many of the 15,000 patients a year who undergo the Charnley operation are not only back on their feet, but dancing.

The Lasker Foundation also handed out $5,000 awards for basic research to four of the country's leading cancer investigators. Dr. Ludwik Gross of The Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital was cited for his discovery of animal leukemia viruses. Dr. Sol Spiegelman of Columbia University was honored for the first successful synthesis of an infectious virus-like particle. Dr. Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin was recognized for his studies of how viruses reproduce. Dr. Howard Skipper of Birmingham's Southern Research Institute was cited for his work in biochemistry and cell biology. Medicine is still far from finding a "cure" for cancer. But without the understanding that these researchers have provided, the search would be more difficult.

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