Medicine: Nobel Prizes, 1943, 1944

In this year’s Nobel prizes for medical research—the first awarded since 1939—penicillin did not figure. Four winners in medicine were announced last week by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm: three Americans, one Dane. The traditional Stockholm ceremonies will not be held this year; the prizes will be given through the Swedish legation in Washington. To make up for lost years, prizes were awarded for.both 1943 and 1944.*

Dam, Doisy and Vitamin K. Drs. Henrik Dam and Edward Adelbert Doisy share the 1943 medicine prize ($29,500.07) for discovery and synthesis, respectively, of vitamin K, the “blood-coagulation vitamin.” This is the fifth time vitamin research has won a Nobel prize.

Fair-skinned Dr. Dam, 49, is a Dane who taught biochemistry in Copenhagen until the Germans came. Then he managed to reach the U.S. via Finland, is now doing research in biochemistry at the University of Rochester’s medical school. In the early ’30s he noticed that baby chicks on a restricted diet had tiny hemorrhages under their skins. Their blood, he found, contained very little prothrombin, a blood element necessary for clotting. He cured them by feeding them pigs’ liver, alfalfa, cabbage, spinach, etc. In 1935 he announced that he had isolated the curative substance from the foods, called it vitamin K after his scientific word for it—Koagulationsvitamine.

Dr. Doisy, tall, meticulous, 50-year-old head of the Biochemistry Department at St. Louis University, was already famous when he began working on vitamin K: he had isolated theelin, a female sex hormone in 1929, and a similar hormone in 1936 (TIME, Aug. 24, 1936). In 1939 he announced that he had analyzed two substances giving the same activity as vitamin K, and recently he patented a method of synthesizing.the vitamin. Synthetic vitamin K, called Menadione (fluid injections or tablets), has saved many lives.

The injections and pills are not needed by healthy people. Extra vitamin K is needed when disease cuts off bile flow and impairs intestinal absorption. It is also given to women a few days before childbirth and to newborn babies.

Erlanger, Gasser and Nerves. Drs. Joseph Erlanger and Herbert Spencer Gasser split the 1944 award ($29,059.08) for demonstrating how nerve fibers react to electrical impulses.

Dr. Erlanger is a small, earnest, 70-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate who was professor of physiology at St. Louis’ Washington University for 34 years. Last July he became professor emeritus, but he goes right on teaching and experimenting. Dr. Gasser, 56, is the tall, thin physiologist who has headed the Rockefeller Institute since 1935 (TIME, July 22, 1935). He also is a Hopkins man, was also a Washington University teacher (1916 to 1931).

In general, their experiments sent small electrical impulses along isolated nerve strands (from frogs, etc..) and recorded the speed and volume of fiber responses. As the amounts of electricity involved were very small, the doctors devised a way of recording the impulses, using a cathode ray oscillograph (rays from a vacuum tube oscillated by an electrical or magnetic field) which made wavy lines on photographic paper.

They found that the various strands in a bundle of nerves, like the wires in a telephone cable, differ in the impulses they transmit; that individual nerve cells are “like tubular electrical condensers”; that the impulses of pain depend on the tiniest nerve strands.

This work is the basis of the well known brain wave machines which detect certain kinds of brain damage, including epilepsy. The recording method is also used to measure the recovery of nerves damaged by wounds or operations.

* The last Nobel peace prize was given in 1938, to the Nansen International Office for Refugees in Geneva.