NEW DISCOVERIES

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 260, 29 July 1932, Page 10

NEW DISCOVERIES

Evidence from Surgery AN AMERICAN’S WORK Dr. J. T. Irving Returns Two modern additions to medical knowledge which had resulted from evidence that had arisen out of surgical practice were mentioned to “The Dominion” yesterday by Dr. J. T. Irving, of Bristol, England, who arrived by the Ruahine. The first concerned the functioning of the pituitary gland, a gland situated at the front of the head, and the second had to do, with an internal secretion which prevented the system from becoming anaemic. Dr. Harvey Cushing, a distinguished American surgeon, was mainly responsible for the first, said Dr. Irving. Cushing had done a great deal of brain surgery and a lot of work on the pituitary, in which he had observed various changes taking place in particular patients. Cushing had managed to correlate those various changes with conditions of the patient he observed before operating. Tumours of one kind and another in the pituitary could result in abnormalities in growth or organs. This work, said Dr. Irving, was outstanding, although it had been said that Cushing’s mortality rate was high. The other development of medical knowledge was one that could not have

taken place but for modern surgery having enabled radical changes to be made to certain organs in major operations. As a result of this, surgeons dealing with patients suffering from certain diseases had gone to the length of removing small or large portions of the stomach, according to the requirements of the case. Through this it had been found that if more than a certain amount of the stomach were removed the patient became anaemic, and further, that this was due to the fact that cells had been removed which made an acid absolutely essential to the maintenance of a non-anaemic condition.

Animal and Vegetable Kingdom.

Although science has been able to manufacture small pieces of colloidal stuff having many of the properties of living material, it has not yet succeeded, and perhaps never will succeed, in producing anything with the real spark of organic life, continued Dr. Irving. But no matter how difficult that last enterprise may be, the processes of life in animals and plants seem in some respects to be coming to the same terms, so that ultimately the big problem may be more simply expressible. The animal and vegetable kingdoms are being drawn together by an increasing number of analogies or identities, of which one of the most recent, a rather involved one, was explained by Dr. Irving. Dr. Irving spoke in particular of het explanations, which had been advanced to account for the production of lactic acid when a, muscle of the body contracted. The occurrence of the phenomenon was first shown in 1907, and had been something of a puzzle for a long time. But it had been demonstrated now that the lactic acid was formed by a process from the glycogen stored in the muscle. Glycogen was a substance produced in the body from sugar, and stored in the liver or circulated and stored in the muscles. A sort of balance was kept, so that after a bout of exercise in which glycogen was used up at the muscles, further glycogen would circulate to restore the proportions. The peculiar fact, said Dr. Irving, was that the lactic acid was produced from the glycogen in a contracting muscle by a rather complicated process, involving enzyme action, and that the whole process, involving the breaking down of the substances in the muscle, was almost identical with that of the breaking down of yeast. Practically the only difference was that in one case the end result was lactic acid and in the-other case alcohol.. Curious Coinc'dences. It was a curious co-incidence of the kind that was sometimes met with in the consideration of animal and vegetable processes. Another example of it was furnished by the red pigment of the blood, haemoglobin, and the green pigment in the leaves of plants, chlorophyll. Haemoglobin and chlorophyll,.were of precisely the same composition/ although their functions in the different media and under different circumstances were not the same. Chlorophyll acted in a certain way under the action of sunlight to produce carbon for the plant, while haemoglobin combined in a loose sort of way with oxygen in the lungs and took the oxygen all over the body in the bloodstream. But haemoglobin and chlorophyll were the same substance. Identities of this kind established between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, said Dr. Irving, corresponded in general idea with that behind the work of the Indian scientist,. Bose, who had claimed that plants, like animals, had feelings, Bose claimed to have found minute nerves in plants and to have observed plants “registering pain.”

Dr. Irving is a son of Dr. Irving, of Christchurch, and was educated at Christ’s College. He left New Zealand in 1920, and went to Caius College. Cambridge, where he remained for six years, pursuing medical and scientific studies. He took his B.A. in 1923. with a double first in science, and stayed on for three more years doing research work in bio-chemistry. In 1926 he went to Oxford with a Beit Fellowship. and did further research workin his own special field. He resigned the fellowship in 1928, and went to Guy’s Hospital. -'London, taking a medical course. He took his M.D. at Cambridge, and in 1927 gained the degrees of M.A. and I’h.D.