Science: Harvard’s Bulldog

More than two years ago, three doctors of the Harvard Medical School did a weird deed which they saw fit to keep secret until last week. Two female English bulldog litter mates were received in the Harvard laboratory. They were observed and found to grow normally. After a month a needle was thrust daily into the belly region of the slightly smaller dog, injectinganterior-lobe extract of cattle’s pituitary glands. Daily the doctors compared their specimens. In a month the smaller puppy had begun to grow faster than the larger one. Soon the smaller puppy was the larger one.

In June of the next year came a scorching day. In the morning, as usual, the dogs scampered and trotted out on the laboratory roof. Toward the end of the afternoon the doctors were summoned and there in the sunshine lay a monstrous dead bulldog, by now twice the weight of her litter mate, a dog fit for baying at enormous moons. In the burning heat her heart and lungs had failed to function for her abnormal, pituitarily overgrown body. Dead though she was, however, she had proved it possible to grow giants in a laboratory.