Helpful Fish

A small Chinese carp last week succeeded a small Japanese carp, the bitterling, which obstetricians once used as a test for pregnancy (TIME, Oct. 12, 1935), as Medicine's favored fish. Called telescope fish-- because it has big. pop eyes, one out of five is so transparent that its gall bladder, intestine, heart and a big vein in the tail are easily seen. Although telescope fish cost only 3-c- apiece in Philadelphia, only place in the U. S. where they are bred, the visibility of their internal organs makes them precious to medical scientists, particularly to Philadelphia Pharmacologist Arno Viehoever. Dr. Viehoever discovered that the transparent water flea, Daphnia, was a marvelous creature in which to study the biological effects of drugs (TIME, Feb. 14), searched the world for another transparent creature nearer to Man in its structure and physiology, found the transparent telescope fish.

The telescope fish's gall bladder is a greenish globule one-twelfth of an inch in diameter (visible as a disk about the size of the fish's eye but not so dark--see cut}. Dr. Viehoever found that soon after he injected the most trifling amount of the hormones secretin and cholecystokinin into the fish's tail, the gall bladder contracted, and squeezed its green bile into the intestines. This is what human gall bladders normally do during digestion, what they cannot do when obstructed by gallstones or mucus plugs.

Among common drugs administered to make the gall bladder evacuate the bile are calomel (mercurous chloride), rhubarb, mandrake, jalap. New are the hormones secretin and cholecystokinin.

By watching the effect of these and other cholagogic (bile evacuating) substances on the little gall bladder of the telescope fish, Pharmacologist Viehoever hopes to be able to contradict "the dictum of the medical profession that surgery is the stones." only remedy for the removal of gall

*Textbook name: Carassius auratus varietas macrophthalmus Duerigcn.

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