Press Rescue

Fame bounded into the surprised but ready hand of Buffalo's Professor Frank Alexander Hartman last week. Professor Hartman, whose favorite pastime is handball, returned the serve deftly, then withdrew from, the popular game of publicity. Too many newspaper stories can ruin a scientist's professional standing.

Professor Hartman, 47, physiologist at the University of Buffalo, has separated a hormone from the covering, or cortex, of the adrenal glands. He calls his hormone ''cortin." To make one ounce of cortin requires the adrenals of 130 cattle.

Other men have worked with the same hormone--Professor Julius Moses Rogoff of Western Reserve University; Dr. Wilbur Willis Swingle & Joseph John Pfiffner of Princeton, Long Island Biological Laboratories, Parke, Davis & Co. and indirectly Mayo Clinic (TIME, June 22); Drs. Walter Bernard Coffey & John Davis Humber of San Francisco and the Southern Pacific (TIME, Feb. 24, 1930 et seq.). But Professors Rogoff & Hartman, first discoverers of the hormone, have less wealth and facilities at their disposal than the rest. Scientists know of their work, but their reputation has not been widespread. Last fortnight Professor Hartman had opportunity to describe his work before the American Chemical Society at Buffalo (TIME, Sept. 14). The 2,000 chemists present constituted the largest professional audience of his career.

Last week a Chicago reporter of the United Press discovered a Mrs. Andrew Nelson, wife of a workless carpenter and mother of six, dying of dread Addison's disease. Her physician, Dr. Richard Torpin, remarked that extract of adrenal cortex might prolong her life. But the extract was scarce, impossible to get. A small news item resulted.

Carl D. Groat, United Press news director in Manhattan, saw the despatch. As hardbitten newsmen often do, he simultaneously winced at the private tragedy and snapped at the human interest story. He ordered United Press men to hunt for a supply of cortical extract among the physicians of their community. Roscoe Snipes, U. P. bureau manager at Buffalo, recalled Professor Hartman's paper before the chemists, persuaded him through a reporter--after Dr. Torpin had sent a personal request from Chicago--to send a supply.

Professor Hartman had no extra cortin. But in a few hours he cooked some up from the entrails of 900 Chicago cattle. A police escort sped the hormone with U. P. reporters and photographers from Professor Hartman's laboratory. Mail planes rushed the medicine to Chicago, where more police and U. P. men sped it at 80 m. p. h. to dying Mrs. Nelson.

The drug revived her. But it was insufficient to keep her alive for more than a few days.

The Mayo Clinic read of her plight, sent her some Swingle & Pnffner hormone from Rochester, Minn.

Cried Carpenter Nelson : "If it had not been for Dr. Hartman, the airlines, the police, the hospitals and the United Press, mother surely would have died. Thank God that mother is living in the 20th Century."

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