New Found, Cannibal Germs, Hailed as Mighty Weapon in WAR on Disease (part 1)
March 7th, 2007
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
October 1931
Vol. 119, No. 4
New Found, Cannibal Germs, Hailed as Mighty Weapon in WAR on Disease
By Clayton R. Slawter
Unknown to vast majority of his countrymen, an American scientist working quietly with test tubes, germs cultures, and microscopes in a mid-Western laboratory, has made a series of astounding discoveries that may give the medical profession control over a number of deadly diseases.
He is Dr. Arthur I. Kendall, professor of research backteriology in the Northwestern University Medical School at chicago. Made public in a few weeks ago, his findings have been hailed the world over as the greatest forward step in medical bacteriology since the days of the immortal Pasteur.
Kendall’s discoveries may be said to fall into two closely connected groups. First of all, he has succeeded in growing at will, from the blood of patients suffering from these diseases, the germs that cause influenza, measles, arthritis or inflammation of the joints, common colds, and endo carditis or inflammation of the heart lining. Hitherto all efforts of scientists to identify the germs of these familiar, often fatal maladies, and to grow them in the laboratory, had ended in failure.
This achievement obviously is the greatest importance to the future study of these diseases and eventually may lead to means of checking them. The reason other scientists were unable to isolate the germs was that the bacteria were invisible, even with the aid of the most powerful microscopes. For the first time in medical history, Kendall has made them visible.
Even more sensational and far-reaching is his discovery, growing out of these experiments, of a method, reminiscent of the magic wishing ring in the fairy tale, by which he arbitrarily can change the germs of many diseases from their invisible to their visible from and back again. This he has done with the germs of influenza, typhoid fever, infantile paralysis, yellow fever, pncumonia, scarlet fever, and the bacteria that are responsible for boild, abscesses, blood poisoning, and certain skin diseases.
(continued on part 2)