Medicine: Nobel Prizes

In awarding the 1936 Nobel Prize for Medicine last week, the Caroline Medical Institute at Stockholm again pointed to a peculiarity of English medical research. Only one Englishman, the late Sir Ronald (malaria) Ross (1857-1935), has earned the superb salute of a Nobel Prize for work accomplished entirely by himself. Four others have been obliged to split their prizes with men who did equally superb work in the same field of research.*

Last week’s newest prize-sharer was Sir Henry Hallett Dale, director of London’s National Institute for Medical Research. His prize-mate: Professor Otto Loewi of Austria’s old University of Graz. Their joint reward: about $40,000.

Dr. Loewi discovered, Dr. Dale proved, that nervous impulses are the result of chemical action, not of electrical action as had formerly been supposed. Dr. Loewi might have had all the credit for this fundamental physiological work, if he were a more persistent researcher. A rich, energetic, glib man of medium height, he rises each morning at 5 o’clock, is in his laboratory exactly one hour later. Assistants do all the actual experimenting, for Dr. Loewi is remarkably clumsy, breaking almost everything he touches. This characteristic almost ruined Dr. Loewi’s career a decade ago. He asserted that a certain substance inhibited the action of insulin in the body. When colleagues complained that they could not repeat his experiments, he admitted that neither could he because assistants on whom he had relied in the first place had made an error. His frankness in admitting his blunder put him back in the graces of fellow scientists.

Seldom does Dr. Loewi spend more than two years on a subject. This inconstancy gave Sir Henry Dale, a big, diligent Englishman, opportunity to pioneer on his own with many a discovery in the chemistry of nerves. One of the subtlest products of nervous reactions is acetylcholine. Sir Henry found this evanescent substance, when isolated from the body, to be a colorless, odorless, crystalline powder. It causes capillaries and small arteries to dilate, thus lowering blood pressure and slowing the action of an overworking heart. It relaxes smooth muscles, thus relieving spasms of the bladder, ureters, uterus, intestines.

Three years ago when Sir Henry was in the U. S. lecturing to crowds of adulating scholars, he declared: “We do not have knowledge as to the therapeutical or pharmaceutical value of these researches. In the end they may throw light on causes rather than provide materials” (TIME, May 1, 1933). Nonetheless, acetylcholine, typical object of what Nobel Prizewinners Dale & Loewi call autopharmacology, is being used by enterprising doctors to treat arterial hypertension, inflamed arteries, gangrene of feet and hands, profuse sweating in tuberculosis, flaccidity of the bladder and intestines, bed sores.

*Archibald Vivian Hill, with Otto Meyerhof, a German (1922); Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, with Christian Eijkman, a Dutchman (1929); Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, with Edgar Douglas Adrian, another Englishman (1932).