Short Cut?

When the discovery of cortisone was announced last spring by four Mayo Clinic researchers (TIME, May 2), sufferers from arthritis* got a guarded flicker of hope for the future; cortisone almost always eases the symptoms of their crippling affliction. But the new drug is only a palliative, not a cure, and must be used continuously or the symptoms return. It is also pitifully scarce.

Cortisone is made, in 37 chemical steps over a six-month period, from the bile of slaughtered oxen (40 head are required for a single daily dose). Merck & Co., who make it, produce only about 1 1/2 ounces a week. Acutely conscious of the desperate demand, research chemists have been plugging away at the problem, trying to speed the process and eventually mass-produce the drug.

Answer to Prayers? Last week, hopes were briskly and perhaps brashly fanned for a short cut in production. Science Reporter William L. Laurence of the New York Times reported in a Page One story that "The seed of an African plant holds the answer to the prayers of millions for cortisone...Strophanthus sarmentosus is a potentially unlimited source of the raw material for cortisone." This material, he said, is "more closely related to cortisone than ox bile acid, and will therefore require many fewer steps in its chemical conversion...It is 17 steps nearer to cortisone than bile acid."

Laurence, tipped off last spring by a chemist friend of the theoretical possibilities of the seed, read up on the subject and was deeply impressed by what he found. He discussed the matter with President Truman, who passed him on to Oscar Ewing, Federal Security administrator. U.S. scientists had already been ordered to Liberia to study the plants, collect seeds, and investigate the possibilities of large-scale cultivation there, or of transplanting to the U.S. After talking with Laurence, Ewing expansively declared that "this may be to chemistry what the atomic bomb was to physics," and asked for a $1,750,000 appropriation for research.

Doubts & Difficulties. Scientists, however, grew jittery at what some called "unwarranted encouragement" for arthritis sufferers, and tried to calm the wave of optimism. The Mayo Clinic's Dr. Edward C. Kendall, one of the researchers who first announced the cortisone treatment, said of the report: "Interesting, but I don't think that is the answer." In the "four or five years" before enough seeds could be grown, he said, "we expect to have cortisone available in much larger supply from other sources." In the Merck laboratories, the Strophanthus product, sarmentogenin (first isolated in 1915), had already been carefully considered. The synthesis of cortisone from sarmentogenin, a spokesman said, would be "an extremely difficult matter." Its chemical structure is similar to the 17th intermediary product in the current process, he admitted, but that similarity by no means assures that the end-product after further processing will be identical. So far no sarmentogenin, the product of the African plant, has ever been fully processed into cortisone.

The drive for a large-scale production process of some sort would go on, but even at best arthritis victims probably faced years of painful waiting.

* Of whom thers are some 7,000,000 in the U.S. alone.

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