Medicine: Back to the Third Eye?

Descartes believed the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, and doctors later thought it was man’s third or inner eye. The pineal (from the Latin word for pine cone, which it resembles in shape) is a small gland attached to the midbrain.

Doctors, while not certain of what function the organ really performs, have known for years that schizophrenic patients improved after injections of an extract from the pineal glands of cattle. Trouble was that after a few days the patients stopped responding to the treatment and soon relapsed into their former state. Harvard University’s Dr. Mark D. Altschule guessed that this was because of big beef protein molecules in the extract. He set himself the job of isolating the potent fraction in the pineal glands from this kind of protein.

Last week Dr. Altschule reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had succeeded. By a complex series of separation processes ending with centrifugation at 40,000 r.p.m. for 75 minutes, he got a protein-free pineal extract. When he gave it in daily injections to schizophrenics, their symptoms became less severe and their body chemistry, usually marked by a defect in sugar metabolism, edged back toward normal. After injections were stopped, the biochemical improvement lasted about a week, and the mental improvement about ten days longer. On repeated courses of injections, the patients got better and better. Says Dr. Altschule: “We have not yet reached the plateau at which improvement has leveled off.”

Main difficulty is that it takes the pineal glands of 15 steers to make one day’s dose for one patient. With only small quantities available so far, Dr. Altschule estimates that it will take at least two years to get a firm verdict on the extract’s value. Meanwhile, he is testing a preparation from the same substance to be taken by mouth, and chemists are hoping to synthesize it. Exactly why any substance from the pineal gland should have this effect is just as mysterious as oldtime speculation about the clairvoyant third eye.