News for the Chief

From his cream-colored Beverly Hills mansion, aged (85), ailing William Randolph Hearst periodically sends down orders to the 17 daily Hearstpapers for a new blast against an old hate--the vivisection of animals by medical scientists. Hearstlings dutifully grind out editorials and cartoons assailing vivisectionists as "dog torturers" who experiment on animals for the joy of "seeing them suffer."

Last month a different kind of order went out from "the Chief" at Beverly Hills. Dr. Myron Prinzmetal, 41, one of the top U.S. heart specialists and Hearst's personal physician, was showing a movie on his heart researches to the New York Heart Association. The Chief, thinking it would please the doctor, ordered the New York Journal-American to play up the Prinzmetal movie. It was a good medical story. For the first time in history, completely exposed hearts had been photographed in action by high-speed color cameras and the heart action reproduced in slow motion. The pictures indicated that the traditional theory of the heart disease called auricular fibrillation was wrong.

The Telltale Heart. Over the objections of Dr. Prinzmetal, who refused to talk to the Hearst reporter because he thinks lay publicity unethical, the Journal-American gave him special treatment. The story also appeared as an eight-column box on Page One in Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner. But neither Hearst-paper said anything about what every doctor (and several reporters) realized when they saw the film. The photographed hearts were the hearts of animals. To make the films, Dr. Prinzmetal and fellow researchers at Los Angeles Cedars of Lebanon Hospital had experimented on 65 dogs. Rabid old antivivisectionist Hearst was being kept alive by one of the nation's most eminent vivisectionists.

Hearst's sons had known all along. So had his editorial chieftains. But the secret was being kept from the old man. Last week Albert Deutsch, the New York Post Home News's medical columnist (TiME, Aug. 9), exposed this "capital irony." -

Help from Dogs. Columnist Deutsch also repeated a conversation with Dr. Prinzmetal at a medical meeting in Chicago last summer, when Hearst's doctor was demonstrating an earlier heart technique involving radioactive sodium (TIME, July 5). Dr. Prinzmetal said he had tested his radiocardiograph on "scores" of dogs before it was used on humans and "our development of the radiocardiograph would have been impossible without dog experimentation." Asked Deutsch: "Then you don't advocate anti-vivisection?" Replied Dr. Prinzmetal: "On the contrary . . . medical research would be crippled without judicious use of animal experimentation."

At Dr. Prinzmetal's request, Deutsch did not use the story then. But when Deutsch heard that a man who supplied dogs to Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine had been arrested for cruelty to animals, he decided that Hearst's campaign was "no longer just a nuisance. It was a real problem to medical research." Wrote Deutsch: "The medical scientists prefer to experiment on animals . . . The anti-vivisectionists apparently prefer human babies to dogs as experimental objects." In California, Dr. Prinzmetal continued his animal experiments, and his visits to anti-vivisection's high priest.

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