Medicine: Brain Juice

“I beg the New York Times to issue a categorical and sharp denial of these absurd and irresponsible stories. . . . I not only authorize, I implore you to protest energetically in my name against the ridiculous distortions of my scientific work by popular journalism, which represent me as an inventor of a specific against idiocy.”-Dr. Eugen Steinach, to the New York Times Vienna correspondent last week.

Dr. Steinach, 67, at his summer home near Vienna, was indignant and excited because again one of his scientific investigations had been incorrectly popularized. Were he a young medical graduate, he would have to fear for his professional reputation. As it is, he is a recognized endocrinologist and his vexation was against further obfuscation of the unlearned.

Previous misinterpretation was on his reactivation work. Before Serge Voronoff of Paris developed a sex gland transplantation technique. Dr. Steinach had worked in that field. It led him to ligating the vas deferens in men and injecting female sex hormones into women, procedures which reactivated their entire systems. Journalists incorrectly called this rejuvenation.

Last week report of his most recent work, on brain extracts, reached the general public by journalistic interpretation of a weighty article in last month’s issue of Medizinische Klinik (Berlin). He de scribed very technically how he crushed the brains of tree frogs and from the juice se cured an extract which he called centronervin. That extract, when injected into the lymph systems and thence into the blood stream of live frogs stimulated them remarkably. It toned up their muscles, made them stronger, especially it seemed to speed up their reactions. Treated frogs saw flies more quickly than normal frogs, caught more of them. Brain juices of rats, dogs and cows caused comparable effects on individuals of those classes.

So Dr. Steinach made a cautious suggestion to experimental biologists: “One may imagine that mental undevelopment might partially be related to the insufficient secretion of natural irritants required by the central nervous system. Furthermore, it is possible that diseases of the central nervous system are psychical anomalies which may be due to the lack of this stimulating secretion. In such cases therapeutic experiments with such an excitant might be attempted.”

Here, decided journalists, was an elixir of intelligence. Idiocy, in their thoughtless declarations, was now curable. Dr. Steinach last week emphatically assured the world that it was not an elixir of intelligence, but might be called an elixir “of temperament, because it is a natural stimulant.” It restores overworked and overtired nerves to normal and makes sluggish animals active.

Steinach has “certainly not” tried centronervin on humans. “It is a tremendous field and only sheer ignorance could imagine that such a problem could be solved by a few experiments on tree frogs.”

At Berlin an ambitious, shrewd sexagenarian last week asked the public insurance fund to pay for a Steinach reactivation operation upon him. His chief plea was that old age is a common ailment.* Astounded insurance executives fubbed off the old man’s demands. To grant them would set a precedent which would upset all their mortality calculations.

* Old age is not a pathologic process, but a normal physiologic involution process, states Dr. Aldred Scott null in his Old Age: the Major Involution: the Physiology & Pathology of the Aging Process (Hoeber, $3). Dr. VVarthin, 63, is professor of pathology and director of the pathological laboratories at the University of Michigan.