Research: Separating the Inseparable

When man prepares such things as foods and drugs, he can keep track of the materials he uses, and thus he will know what the finished product will be made of. But when man tries to take apart some of the enormously complex mixtures of organic chemicals that have been made by nature—most notably, the hundreds of enzymes and other proteins in his own blood, the scores of hormones secreted by his glands, or the dozen antibiotics that may be made in a single fermentation brew—he scarcely knows where to begin. For nature’schemicals may look alike and yet be distinguished by invisible differences of life-or-death importance in medicine.

Last week the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced that its 1963 award of $10,000 for basic medical research will go to a man who is not a physician, but who has developed a technique for discovering those important differences. The man is the Rockefeller Institute’s Dr. Lyman Creighton Craig; the technique is called countercurrent distribution, or C.C.D.

Crystal Pipe Organ. Iowa-born Chemist Craig, 57, went to the Rockefeller in 1933 and did a monumental job separating the ingredients of ergot. World War II prompted Dr. Craig to switch to a group of chemicals that the armed forces were studying as substitutes for quinine. Among them was chloroquine, and Dr. Craig needed to know whether a chloroquine preparation was reasonably pure or contaminated with too many related chemicals.

Working with Technician Otto Post, he put together an intricate array of glassware that looks like a crystal pipe organ for Queen Mab’s palace. It makes no music, but clicks monotonously every 30 to 120 seconds when it tilts to pour off some of its mixture. This C.C.D. machine works on the principle of liquid-liquid extraction: two substances are not likely to be equally soluble in two different solvents. And if the solvents are not soluble in each other, they can be separated. Whatever is dissolved in them will be separated also.

Dr. Craig dissolves the substances to be separated in one of the solvents; the solution is shaken with the other solvent to produce an emulsion (crudest example: oil and water). The substance that he wants to pick out will dissolve more in one component than in the other when they are all shaken up in the glass tubes. The emulsion causes rapid distribution of the substances between the solvents. After the solvents have separated, the C.C.D.’s electronic brain tells it to tilt and pour off the liquid from the top of each tube into the next tube. Repeated hundreds or thousands of times over a period of hours or days, the process usually yields pure chemical compounds.

From the chloroquine family of chemicals, Dr. Craig moved on to the penicillins, which were being produced under a wartime crash program. He has since turned to bacitracin (another anti-biotic), fatty acids, the master hormones of the pituitary gland, the hormones of the parathyroid, and insulin.

Hormones & Cancer. For the Lasker clinical research award, the judges decided that the achievements of two men were of so nearly equal merit that even C.C.D. could not separate them. Checks for $5,000 each will goto:

>Surgeon Charles Brenton Huggins, 62, of Chicago, who may go down in medical history as “the great castrator” because he discovered in 1941 that many men with prostate cancer can be saved by castration, which shuts off the supply of male sex hormones on which the cancer battens. The operation need not be surgical: it can also be done by X rays, or chemically with female hormones. The corresponding operation in women, removal of the ovaries, will spare many victims of spreading breast cancer. Huggins also showed that removal of the adrenals helps these women patients.

> Surgeon Michael Ellis DeBakey, 55, of Houston, a bold pioneer in attacking mechanical defects of blood vessels. DeBakey’s work ranges from the aorta to the arteries that supply the brain; he has learned to repair them with ingenious grafts or get around the trouble with shunts.