Medicine: Yale Proof

Yale’s learned Neuro-Anatomist Harold Saxton Burr last year revealed that a complicated electrical device he and associates invented could tell when a woman’s ovary had produced a full-grown ovum and thus put her in the essential preliminary state for having a baby (TIME, Nov. 23). Such foreknowledge might guide a woman’s conduct in case she did not want to have a baby. Professor Burr immediately denied that his “vacuum tube microvoltmetre for the measurement of bioelectric phenomena” provided any such useful domestic data. Disappointed were many good citizens—not all of whom were Roman Catholics—who prefer to practice birth control by periodic abstinence rather than by mechanical or chemical means. Last week Dr. Burr cheered such folk by effectively contradicting his denial. Stated he in Science: “The use of the Burr-Lane-Nimms technique enables one to determine with certainty and accuracy the time of ovulation in an intact human being.”

The technique requires an electrical gadget whose invention may bring Dr. Burr a Nobel Prize. In a box small enough to be carried around are four different kinds of electric batteries, a delicate galvanometre, two radio vacuum tubes, eleven resistors, one grid leak and four switches. “The actual construction should be undertaken by an experienced mechanic who is thoroughly familiar with radio set construction,” says Dr. Burr, who is prepared to show any proper investigator a sketch of the wiring diagram.

This microvoltmetre must be used with special electrodes. When properly set up and adjusted the apparatus indicates only minute direct electrical currents generated by living creatures, and shuts out the long known alternating currents which physiologists use to determine the condition of the heart, the energy of the biceps, the well-being of nerves.

Last year Dr. Burr was absolutely sure that a surge in the micropotential of rabbits and cats, as registered on the microvoltmetre, indicated ovulation simply because he could cut those creatures open and examine the state of their ovaries. But since he could not perform a major operation on a woman just to confirm the meaning of an electrical surge through her flesh, he had to wait until a lucky break provided him this year with an amiable woman who was scientifically-minded and going to have an abdominal operation anyway.

Dr. Burr and his subject delayed the operation until the day when previous microvoltmetre readings predicted an ovum would rupture out of a follicle of an ovary and cause a faint electrical upset. That overture to gestation occurred at 7:05 p.m. July 24 and threw the microvoltmetre out of whack for several seconds. Immediately the woman’s potential slowly decreased. Said Dr. Burr last week: “The condition continued until midnight when the experiment was terminated in order that the patient might obtain a night’s rest. Next morning a laparotomy was done, the ovaries examined, and in the left ovary the bright punctate hemorrhage of a recently ruptured follicle was found.” He continued: “Fortunately, this was located at one pole of the ovary.” So with no harm to his collaborator, the follicle was dug out for Dr. Burr to preserve forever as an epochal piece of human tissue.

Spectacular as that operation was and useful as it might be to specialists in birth control, it was simply one incident in a profound research into fundamental biological activity which Dr. Burr and colleagues at Yale are quietly pursuing. They want to analyze “the electrical properties [of living creatures] and determine where and how they appear and to find some reasonable explanation of their presences. . . . It is not improbable that they may be bound up with the dynamic wholeness of a living system. Electrical currents produce electrical fields and it is possible that a living organism possesses not only many small fields but a single large field. Moreover, it is possible that these fields are not mere by-products of cellular activity, but are to some extent determining and guiding factors in development and living processes. … It is possible that individuals can be grouped into classes on the basis of their electrical properties. . . . Emotional states and mental processes also could be studied and, if our present findings are significant, the result may well be exciting.”