Medicine: Looking at Cells

The University of Pennsylvania last week celebrated the 165th anniversary of its medical school (oldest in the land) with banquets, speeches by five of the eight sages* to whom it gave honorary degrees, inspections of its vast medical plant, and President-elect Thomas Sovereign Gates’ declaration: “I would rather see one ounce of genius developed here than tons of mediocrity.”

When an institution gives such an affair, it strives to add the savor of some new scientific achievements. Pennsylvania’s condiment was the demonstration of a way of seeing living cells grow in the body. Inventor was Eliot Round Clark, 49, professor of anatomy and director of Pennsylvania’s anatomical laboratory.

Heretofore, to examine cells microscopically it has been necessary to put a thin slice of tissue on a glass slide. The cells are either dead in the beginning, else die during the handling. Or it is possible to grow the cells in “tissue cultures,” as Dr. Alexis Carrel has for years grown embryonic chicken tissue at the Rockefeller Institute. This in vitro method, however, fails to give an exactly truthful picture of all cell growth.

Professor Clark punches a tiny hole in the ear of a rabbit, similar to the holes which women used to pierce through their ears for earrings. In the hole he puts a double window. One pane is of glass or celluloid, the other of thin mica. The panes are 1/2,000 in. apart. So soon as the window is in place, the rabbit’s ear begins to heal. Blood vessels, nerves, cells, all the appurtenances of living flesh work their way between the panes. When the rabbit is fastened so that the ear hole can be placed beneath a microscope every stage of the growth can be observed, magnified 1,000 times. Dr. Clark has had moving pictures made of the growing tissue. Not only can the growth and life of normal cells be closely and continuously watched but also the process of disease, like tuberculosis and cancer.

Working with Dr. Clark on his rabbit’s ear “window” has been Eleanor Linton Clark, 42, his wife. They married in 1911, when he was associate professor of anatomy at Johns Hopkins. Ever since she has been a “private investigator in anatomy” and his immediate assistant wherever he has taught—Johns Hopkins (1907-14), University of Missouri (1914-22), University of Georgia (1922-26), University of Pennsylvania (since 1926). She is one of the few women recognized by American Men of Science. The Clarks are one of the very few couples who jointly have attained scientific eminence. Another such couple are the Dicks of Chicago (Dr. George Frederick, 49, and Dr. Gladys Henry), inventors of the Dick Test for scarlet fever. Most famed of such scientific couples were, of course, the radium Curies.

*Surgeon General Hugh Simon Gumming of the U. S. Public Health Service; Sir Walter Morley Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Re-search Council of Great Britain; Professor Archibald Vivian Hill of the Royal Society: Dr. James Ramsay Hunt, Columbia’s professor of neurology; President William Gerry Morgan of the American Medical Association: Dr. Alfred Stengel, Pennsylvania’s professor of medicine: Dr. Alonzo Englebert Taylor, Leland Stanford’s director of food research; Johns Hopkins’ William Henry Welch, dean of U. S. medicine.