Monkeys Worried To Cause Heart Attacks

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29102, 14 January 1960, Page 9

Monkeys Worried To Cause Heart Attacks

(Rec. 11.15 p.m.) WASHINGTON, January 13. Soviet scientists have been deliberately causing heart attacks among baboons and rhesQs monkeys; in experiments to discover if such seizures are caused by worry and anxiety.

An American Army pathologist, Colonel Joseph Plumberg, revealed this yesterday. He recently returned from a visit to the Soviet Union He said that heart attacks had been produced in baboons and monkeys in as little as two months merely by upsetting the animals’ living routine and taking steps to cause mental anxiety. , . . For instance, the animals had been fed at night instead or during the daytime. The lighting in their quarters had been changed, and they had been placed for a time in unfamiliar surroundings. _ Colonel Blumberg said the Soviet anxiety experiments were conducted at Sukhumi in the Georgian Republic, where the Russians had more than tuu monkeys and larger primates maintained exclusively for medical experiments. Colonel Blumberg spent three weeks in the Soviet Union with Dr Frank Hartman, an Air Force medical consultant, and Dr. John Edgecombe, of the National Insti-

tutes of Health, under a RussianAmerican scientific exchange programme. . _ _ Colonel Blumberg also said that United States scientists should look into the feasibility of using, for transfusion purposes blood taken from corpses within four hours after death, as was done at the Institute for Emergency Surgery in Moscow. He said there was no demonstrated need for this procedure in the United States as yet. and that there would be legal difficulties in getting Permission to take blood so soon after sudden de But in an emergency situation where great quantities of blood were needed, he said, the pro cedure “might answer the prob’e He added that the Moscow institute has used •‘routinely in the last 30 years, 30 tons of blood taken from corpses, and that, with proper there was no reason to believe this blood was inferior for medical purposes to blood taken from a living person.