Discussion 145 



actually determined by genes, or is the action of genes merely permissive? 

 Generally speaking, if you die before 40, in many cases it is not because 

 your genes have cut you off at 40 or earlier, it is because you had a nasty 

 accident of some sort! Now why should the causes of death be any 

 different when you come to the eighties ? It seems to me to be an entirely 

 arbitrary assumption on your part. 



Kallmann : How arbitrary it may be, I would not know. I have talked 

 in tentative terms. We can only report what happens to a population 

 of over 2,000 twins who reached the age of 60. If you think that we have 

 selected material, distinguished by the ability to reach the age of 60 

 (at least one member of the pair), this possibility I shall concede to 

 you. Of course, we cannot study people at the age of 60 who died at an 

 earlier age. That would be too much to expect. But twins who are 60 

 years old can be followed for the purpose of determining what happens 

 to them. In such a material, certain intra-pair differences observed in 

 one-egg pairs are significantly different from those obtained in two-egg 

 pairs. If such evidence is not accepted as substantiating a genetic theory, 

 it is difficult to investigate problems of this kind. 



Gillman: Prof. Kallmann, you showed two coloured slides of unusual 

 cells. The first picture seemed to show a brown pigment and the second 

 had green granules or green diffuse staining. Was this stain for iron or 

 for lipids ? 



Kallmann: For lipids. 



Gillman: Is this the nile blue sulphate method? It is unusual to stain 

 lipid blue, with the brown granule. Was this only lipid or was it a lipo- 

 protein iron complex? 



Kallmann: In the first coloured slide, the yellow granules represent 

 lipochrome pigment. As the name indicates, we are dealing with a 

 complex lipid in addition to a yellow pigment (carotin). In the second 

 slide, the reddish granules represent a mixture of fat-stainable substances 

 as revealed by the Sudan III method and Cajal's gold sublimate 

 impregnation technique. 



Gillman: We have found mental disturbances to be common in Africans 

 with pellagra or with severe liver damage unassociated with frank 

 pellagra. Close relations are known to exist between nicotinic acid and 

 tryptophan metabolism in the canine equivalent of pellagra, while ab- 

 normal indole and skatol metabolism are common in human pellagrins. 

 These latter derivatives of tryptophan are closely related to 5-hydroxy- 

 tryptamine. Consequently we have been considering the possibility 

 that the mental disturbances in Africans with pellagra or chronic liver 

 damage may be due to some derangements in serotonin metabolism, 

 resulting directly or indirectly from malnutrition. 



One wonders, in the light of Prof. Kallmann's data, whether any 

 investigation has been made on two aspects: (1) on the physiology and 

 (2) on the pathology of the people studied by him; the first, from the 

 point of view of the excretion in the urine of derivatives of 5-hydroxy- 

 tryptamine and/or lysergic acid, resulting from disturbances in the 

 intermediary metabolism of these substances; and, secondly, whether 

 in his cases any studies have been conducted comparable with those of 



