The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-01-15
prom the chIeago Record.Herald.

< Flexner of the Rockefeller Insti- ute for Medical Research last night to be the probable medical combatant of the future of the germs of infantile pa- ralysis.
 pr. F1exner spoke before the South Side branch of the Medical society in Lincoln Center, oakwood boulevard and Langley avenue. He said that urotropin is the only known drug the properties of which make 1t a foe to the paralysis germs.
 Experiments are being conducted which he declared would so modify the drug that it will in a short time become an active and powerful means of controlling the disease of infantile paralysis.
 "This drug is ieasily molded to our wishes by application of other chemicals,' said Dr. Flexner. "Our aim is to make it more thoroughly antiseptic and that is what our experiments are doing.
 q think it will be only a short time before urotropin will be the means by which we can control this disease. Ger tain it is that this drug comes near to being powerful agent for the destruc- tion of the paralysis germs.
 I've have no serum that we can safely say is a direct control of this disease, but in urotropin lies our hopes. Experi- ments with this drug indicate that our hopes are not based on too fragile a foun- dation.
 Besides. we have three or four other drugs, but none gives us the hope that urotropin affords us. Our experiments have been conducted mostly on monkeys.
 Tt is a peculiar fact that our inves- legations and experiments on monkeys prove far more beneficial and instructive than similar Investigations or expert ments with the human species"
 Dr. Flexner said monkeys have been inoculated with the disease by injec- tion of the virus into the spinal column, generations
 '"That this virus increases in potency, instead of decreasing in activity, is a fact" said Dr. Flexner. ''When We began our experiments, several years ago, we did not think the life of the virus was as 1t is. It can be subjected to the most severe treatments and yet thrive. In the unusual resistence of this virus lies the difficult task now confronting us in our effort to discover a drug or serum which will give us an accurate and positive means of controlling this disease.
 "In recent years we have learned of certain diseases which seem to be con- fined to human beings which could not be transferred to the ordinary lower ani- mals but which could be transferred to lower animals which are not so far re- moved in the animal series from the human species.
 ''The animals which are most closely allied to the human species are the ape and monkeys. The ordinary monkey, which is further removed than the an- thropoid. can be made to acquire cer- tain of the human diseases which the or dinary lower animals do not acquire or do not acquire in such a form so char acteristically or so readily as to make them available for study.
 "1t is necessary to bring the virus of the disease into close association with the | nervous system of these animals. 'It required that a method should be employed by which the virus should be brought into immediate relationship with the nervous centers, and that was se- cured by taking material from the spinal cord and introducing it directly into the brain of these animals, which is readily done under anasthesia, by inoculation through a small opening in the skull.
 'When this happens, and the incubation | napioA fhran or four days to 30, and averaging generally about eight or nine days, during which the animals are perfectly well, symptoms appear
 'I mention this because in human cases sometimes the paralysis comes on withost any previous obvious condition of illness, and sometimes after only a few days or few hours, or sometimes several days of illness.
 There is. however. one striking differ ence in the effects of the disease on mon- keys produced experimentally and that which occurs spontaneously in human be- ings.
 ''At first, when the virus Is transferred, certain number of the animals tend to get well-perhaps only half of them die; the other half tend to survive, but once the virus has become established in the monkeys practically none of them get vel they all die. Happily. there is nothing comparable to this in the human affec- tion, but this mere fact in itself is illum- mating.
 Tt is indicative that In these success sive' transfers of the virus from monkey to monkey there occurs a modification of it, and we have learned that races of the virus are in this manner capable of development and that the original race which is transferred has human charac- teristics.
 "I know experiments have been made to determine whether that virus, if it were reintroduced in human beings, would have it's original virulence for them, but it is fair assumption that it would not have the same virulence for human beings as it had originally. 5
 Tt has in all probability lost certain power of infecting human beings. That 1 is property which is common to many of the parasitic micro organisms.
 "The significant point concerning the human affection which this observation gs out is that probably in epidemics | as the disease advances and becomes | highly frequent and severe, the change | from the disease as 1t appears sporadical ly in cases here and there in a commun | ity. or over a large territory, to acquire these exquisite epidemic properties that make it possible to infect large mum. Der of human beings that similar trans of ho t.itll q.