VIRAL INFECTION IN BATS 

 CAMPBELL: Have you ever injected the brown fat? 



SULKIN: Yes, into a non- hibernating animal. The experiments 

 don't work too well. Two sets of experiments have been re- 

 ported previously, and conflicting results were obtained.2»3 



BLAIR: Bigelow has done this in Toronto. 



SULKIN: These are extracts, and they are not very pure. 



BLAIR: He transplanted the brown fat and the results were 

 entirely negative. 



SULKIN: Nobody has as yet been able to define the active 

 component in brown fat tissue that is likely to be related to 

 hibernation. And I think that there is a growing interest in this 

 tissue as the true mechanism of hibernation. 



TRAPANI: One thing we tried which seemed to indicate some 

 activity of brown fat was this: We made a saline extract out of 

 brown fat obtained from the Guinea pigs exposed to 2° G for 

 about 10 weeks. Ordinarily, you put Guinea pigs into -15° C 

 and they don't do very well; they die quickly. However, when 

 saline extract of brown fat was injected into animals kept at 

 -15° C, they survived another day or so. We never tried it again 

 because of the lack of time. 



SULKIN: I think that if you tried it again, it might not work. 

 When saline extracts of brown fat were used by previous in- 

 vestigators, they yielded inconsistant results. 



ANDRE WES: We have been hearing quite a lot in the last two 

 days on the subject of cold and other stressing factors. There 

 is one form of stress that has never been mentioned. There 

 were some experiments done a good many years ago on pneu- 

 mococcal infections in partly- immunized mice when it was shown 



2 Zirm. 1956. Zschr. f Naturforsch. 11: 530-535. 



3 Kross. 1933. Zschr. f. d. ges. Neurol. Psych. 146: 208-218. 



397 



