Medicine: Conscientious Guinea Pigs

Wayne Arthur Reeve, 21, is a husky Quaker from Indianapolis and he has rarely known sickness. But last week it was a little hard for him to visit friends in his ward in the imposing Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. In Reeve’s left wrist was a hypodermic needle from which rubber tubing ran to an infusion bottle hanging from a stand on casters. This elaborate rig, which Reeve moved along with him, was needed to keep him from being immobilized for eight hours while ACTH dripped slowly into his veins so that research doctors could study what happened to hormones in Reeve’s bloodstream.

Quaker Reeve is one of a dozen volunteers serving as human guinea pigs at Bethesda. He is also a conscientious objector. Under the Selective Service Act he had elected to work off his obligation with two years of service contributing to “the maintenance of the national health, safety or interest.” Of the 4,000 Quakers, Mennonites, members of the Assemblies of God and Church of the Brethren, or other pacifist sects who choose this course each year, most go to work as attendants in mental hospitals. Only a hardy few volunteer for guinea-pig duty.

Low Fat, No Fat. Preceding Reeve in a similar drip test was 20-year-old Arthur Birk (Brethren) of Teegarden, Ind. As soon as the doctors had learned what they could about the effect of ACTH on his adrenals’ output of electrocortin, they put him on a salt-free diet. All he had to do was to promise not to take any food or drink away from the center. He could work on its house newspaper or play golf or go into Bethesda for the movies. But it was no snap: he lost 15 pounds in a week.

Some volunteers go on diet rotation: one week with low fat, one with no fat, one on high fat. During each stage, the human guinea pigs are tapped for blood samples for studies of the fat content. Some get a regular prebreakfast injection of heparin (a drug usually administered to prevent bloodclotting) to see what effect it has on fats in the blood.

Another guinea pig now in the Bethesda center is 24-year-old Robert Brantner (Brethren) of Lanark, Ill. In metabolism studies he is being kept on a rice diet in an effort to make this unsalted. monotonous regimen (usually prescribed to keep down water retention in heart cases) less wearisome and more nourishing. The trouble has been that because it lacks protein the rice-fruit menu causes the dieter to burn up his own body proteins. Metabolism experts have tried to prevent this in Brantner’s case by adding two amino acids, lysine and threonine, to his diet. Also, he has had a break because his rice dishes prepared in the center’s elaborate metabolic kitchens have included such delicacies as olives, mushrooms and an apple pie (made with a rice crust).

Nor Any Drop to Drink. Also at the center have been two women, not subject to the draft but giving a year’s service at the behest of their churches: 24-year-old Ruth Hepner (Assemblies of God) of Hamilton. Mont, and 22-year-old Florence Shetler (Brethren) of Robinson, Pa. Both have spent weeks taking tiny daily doses of cortisone and giving frequent blood samples so that doctors can measure the rate of its disappearance from the bloodstream. For still more refined studies they have taken hormones tagged with radioactive atoms.

Before he went to Bethesda, Wayne Reeve had done guinea-pig duty at the University of Michigan, where Dr. Jerome W. Conn is studying stress. The stress to which he exposed Reeve was thirst: five days with nothing to drink. “It wa,s a big temptation,” says Reeve, “especially when I was brushing my teeth and it would have been so easy to drink a little. But you don’t want to ruin the experiment.”

For each guinea pig’s services the Government pays $115 a month to the church that handles his recruitment. The church, in turn, pays the volunteer $10 to $20 a month for pocket money. Says Dr. Conn: “Things are a lot tougher for these boys than for many in the Army. Considering the kind of things they go through, they really have to be conscientious objectors to take it.”