Test-tube Sleuth

Though they abound in detective fiction, police toxicologists are rare in the U. S. When the police of almost any big city want to know what poison was used or what drug taken in a puzzling crime, they must apply to the faculty of some medical school or to a commercial laboratory. One of the few cities with an official toxicologist is New York, which has Dr. Alexander Oscar Gettler, a hard-bitten professor who teaches chemistry at New York University when he is not sleuthing for the city with his test-tubes. Last week Dr. Gettler. taking with him a grim array of bones, knives, vials and photographs, went before the American Institute in Manhattan to deliver a public lecture on his specialty. He has shared in some 30,000 autopsies, "which gave me a training and experience unobtainable at the present time in any other city in the world." He told about some of the better known autopsies.

Starr Faithfull. a sexually distraught, neurotic young woman whose death excited the nation (TIME. June 29. 1931, et seq.). died by drowning after she had been drugged with luminal and thrown from a boat, declared Dr. Gettler. A difference of saltiness between the bloods in the right and left cavities of her heart, ''the only positive test of death by submersion." showed that the young woman had actually died in that manner. Dr. Gettler established the blood-saltiness test for drowning by drowning dogs in salt and fresh waters. He found that, in drowning, water always gets into the lungs, then into the left cavities of the heart, and adulterates the blood. Before the heart can pump the altered blood through the system and back to the right heart cavities, the individual is dead, the heart stopped. If the person drowns in salt water the left heart blood is saltier than the right heart blood. Since blood is salty to begin with, the opposite is true for drownings in fresh water.

As for Starr Faithfull being drugged, analysis of her organs showed that she had had about twelve grains of luminal in her body. Two grains make a person sleep, twelve grains may kill but will certainly keep one unconscious for a long period. Someone must have heaved Starr Faithfull over a ship's rail. That someone has not yet been arrested.

Dogs must be taught to like alcohol. Dr. Gettler. a deliberate, inquisitive investigator, taught a pack to get drunk in order to find a measure of intoxication in man. Some individuals burn up alcohol faster than others. The quick-burners can drink much more than the others before getting drunk. But every drunk's brain is wet with alcohol. Thus Dr. Gettler could tell that Ruth Snyder besotted her husband before she and Judd Gray crushed his skull with a sash weight (TIME. April 4, 1927, et seq.}. Driving from the crime she tried to enhearten Judd Gray with a slug of whiskey. "That whiskey." said Dr. Gettler, "was loaded with bichloride of mercury. Sweet woman." Both murderers have been electrocuted. Wilmer Stultz, flyer who carried Amelia Earhart on her first trip across the Atlantic, was drunk, his brain subsequently proved to Toxicologist Gettler, when he killed himself and two passengers in a Long Island crash. Eben McBurney Byers. the Pittsburgh industrialist who died after prolonged drinking of radium water (TIME. April 11. 1932). "took the stuff," said Dr. Gettler. "for rejuvenation. He was a good man. He gave it to his friends. At first you feel fine. It bucks you up, for maybe six months. Then we get ready to put parts of you in a frame."

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