Bachelor's Cocktail

In a laboratory at Norway's Oslo University one day last week there was no humdrum of routine work. Instead the atmosphere was charged with excitement and apprehension. Surrounded by colleagues who stood ready to man pulmotors and apply stimulants if something went wrong, Professor Klaus Hansen (Toxicology & Pharmacology) gulped down a scientific cocktail which cost $25 and just filled two teaspoons. Reason for the spinal shivers was not the cost of the drink but the fact that it was 98% pure "heavy water."

Every molecule of pure "heavy water" contains hydrogen of the doubleweight kind identified by Columbia's Harold Clayton Urey in 1931. Long before Dr. Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery (TIME, Nov. 26), experimenters were finding that heavy water did strange things to small animals and plants. It killed guppies, tadpoles, flatworms, prevented tobacco seeds from sprouting, dimmed the light of luminous bacteria, made mice appear tipsy and terribly thirsty. Then Professor Ingo Waldemar Dagobert Hackh of San Francisco's College of Physicians & Surgeons guessed that a slow, steady increase in the amount of heavy water in the human body might be a cause of old age and senile death.

Last December a Canadian mail-carrier, hearing echoes of this speculation, brashly sent word to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he would fearlessly drink any amount of "heavy water." No attention was paid to him. Oslo observers last week declared that the Hansen gulp marked the first human consumption of heavy water. That was not quite true. From Germany two curious scientists recently reported drinking very dilute heavy water to mark the length of time that fluids remain in the body. But Professor Hansen's dose was the first recorded drink of heavy water in high concentration.

Apparently unharmed, "he described his feelings: "I lifted the beaker to my lips. Immediately I felt a burning dry sensation in my mouth and then I could feel nothing. First my mind became excited and impressed with a feeling of crisis.

"I had some shock. Then I said to myself, 'Be quiet--you are simply going through a minor experience.' Then it was all over. I could see, hear, breathe, feel and walk just as before.

"My colleagues were delighted, but they did not abandon the apparatus prepared for resuscitating me in case of a sudden turn for the worse. To be harmful heavy water must be consumed, I think, in much larger quantities than I have indicated. That is only an opinion. Nobody knows anything about it.

"Within the next few weeks, I shall either be seriously ill or able to tell what the effects are, for I intend to raise the dose by easy stages during the next fortnight to the final and testing drink of 100 grams [about three ounces]."

Professor Hansen, 39, is a bachelor.

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