354 



NATURE 



[July 3, 1919 



MEDICAL SCIENCE IN THE WAR. 



SIR ANTHONY BOWLBY, at the annual general 

 meeting of the Research Defence Society on 

 June 26, gave an admirable little address on "Experi- 

 mental Medicine and the Sick and Wounded in the 

 War." He spoke with authority; there is no surgeon 

 with more right to do that. But, of course, he could 

 not do more than touch points here and there of the 

 great subject. He took for these points typhoid, 

 tetanus, gas-gangrene, dysentery, and trench-fever, 

 and he began with this praise of our Army : that it 

 had been the healthiest Army in the war, partly 

 because " the average Briton is naturally a cleanly 

 animal," partly because the British soldier under- 

 stands a reasonable explanation, and is guided by it 

 in daily life, and partly because our Army Medical 

 Service, "a body of men unequalled in ;<ny other 

 country on the face of the globe," was constantly 

 lecturing to the combatant officers, who in their turn 

 instructed their men in the ways of health. So it 

 came to pass that the amount of " sick wastage " in our 

 Army was kept low ; and that is how the war was won. 



If that were all, or anything like all, there would 

 be some excuse for the foolish people who say that 

 the health of our Army was safeguarded, not by ex- 

 perimental medicine, but by "ordinary sanitation." 

 But, as Sir Anthony said, "the hygiene of to-day is 

 based upon the experimental medicine of yesterday." 

 It was hygiene to protect our men against typhoid 

 and our wounded men against tetanus; but it came 

 out of the experimental work of Nicolaier, Wright, 

 and others ; there was no possible way but that, if 

 it was ever to come. He reminded his. hearers of 

 the vivid contrast early in the war between the British 

 Expeditionary Force and the French Army; how 

 France, to save herself, had to send out her Army 

 unprotected against typhoid; there was no time to 

 protect them; "the result was that between August i 

 and April they had as many as 60,000 cases of 

 enteric." He might have added the not less remark- 

 able results of the protective treatment later in the 

 war against paratyphoid. 



Next, Sir Anthony spoke of tetanus. We all 

 remember how, in the first months of the war, our 

 national anxiety for our men was heightened by the 

 dreadful news that there was a great deal of tetanus 

 among the wounded : — " At the beginning of the war 

 in France we had a truly terrible attack of tetanus 

 among our wounded. Everybody was surprised and 

 alarmed. The prevalence of the disease had not been 

 anticipated, and consequently there was no pro- 

 phylactic serum in proportion to the number of troops. 

 We could not suddenly supply them with preventive 

 doses of serum. It had to be made. We obtained all 

 the supplies we could get from America, but it took 

 time. In August, September, and October, 1914, our 

 troops were to a great extent uninoculated, and the 

 result was an appalling amount of tetanus. Shortly 

 afterwards almost ever}' man was able to be 

 inoculated. The ratio of the number of cases of 

 tetanus to the number of wounded was about six 

 times as high in September, 1914, as it was in 

 November, and nine times as high as it was in 

 December of the same year." 



Sir Anthony spoke also of experimental medicine 

 in relation to the study and treatment of gas-gangrene 

 and of dysentery, and he and Capt. Walter Elliot 

 (who seconded a vote of thanks to him) spoke of 

 trench-fever and of those memorable experiments on 

 self, by British and American volunteers, which proved 

 the transmission of trench-fever by lice, and made it 

 possible to bring down "by leaps and bounds" the 

 evil done by the disease. Strange to think, with 

 these facts before us, that there are so many people 

 who still belong to "anti-vivisection" societies. 

 NO. 2592, VOL. 103] 



EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF 

 SELECTION. 

 A/TR. A. STURTEVANT has experimented (Pub- 

 ■'■*■*• lication 264, Carnegie Institution of Washing- 

 ton, 1918, pp. 1-68, I plate) with a mutant race of 

 the fruit-fly, Drosophila melanogaster (ampelophila), 

 with the particular object of determining the effects of 

 selection. The mutant character in question is known 

 as Dichaet; it appeared in 1915 in a single female 

 which had wings extended and bent backwards near 

 the base, and with only two dorso-central bristles 

 instead of the usual four. This "Dichaet" character 

 behaves as a dominant, and it appears that the factor 

 or gene corresponding with it is located " in the third 

 chromosome, approximately five units to the left of 

 pink." Dichaet-flies are more variable in bristle- 

 number than are non-Dichaets. The variability is 

 partly environmentah, partly genetic. 



Selection is generally admitted to be capable of 

 effecting change, either gradually or suddenly, in the 

 mean character of a mixed race, but if this be granted 

 a number of questions arise. Does selection use ger- 

 minal differences that are already present, or differ- 

 ences that arise during the experiment? To this the 

 author answers that selection produces its effects 

 chiefly through isolation of factors already present, 

 though occasionally available mutations do arise in 

 the course of the experiment. But if selection uses 

 new differences, does it cause them to occur more 

 frequently, and does it influence their direction? To 

 this the author answers that there are no available 

 data warranting an affirmative answer. 



What selection does is to isolate genetic differences 

 already present. The experiments made on the 

 Dichaet-fly go to show that genes are relatively stable, 

 not being contaminated in heterozygotes, and mutating 

 only very rarely. There is strong confirmation of 

 the multiple-factor view that characters may be in- 

 fluenced by more than one pair of genes. There are 

 genes that modify other genes, but there is no experi- 

 mental evidence that allelomorphs present in the hetero- 

 zygote may influence or "contaminate" each other, 

 so that they do not come out unchanged. The general 

 outcome of Mr. Sturtevant's elaborate investigation is 

 to lead us to believe that the chief rdle of selection 

 is in isolating favourable combinations of genes. 



FUNGUS DISEASES OF ECONOMIC 

 PLANTS. 



OTTO A. REINKING {Philippine Journal of 

 Science, vol. xiii., section A, July, 1918) supplies 

 a list of fungus diseases of Philippine economic plants 

 which will be of value to plant-growers in other 

 tropical areas. The warmth and moisture of the 

 climate account for the great number and destructive- 

 ness of these diseases during the wetter months of 

 the year, and Mr. Reinking estimates that in the 

 province in which he is specially interested at least 

 10 per cent, of agricultural crops are destroyed by 

 fungi. The great factors in the spread and destruc- 

 tiveness of fungi are the lack of proper culture, of 

 sanitation, of pruning, and of spraying. Many of the 

 plants concerned are widely cultivated in the tropics, 

 and the paper has been written in order to give some 

 idea of the prevalence of plant diseases, their causes, 

 mode of attack, plant hosts, the amount of damage, 

 and also the methods of control. Many of the diseases 

 are due to fungus species new to science. The 

 account is illustrated by twenty-two plates and forty- 

 three text-figures. 



Under the title " Seedling Diseases of Conifers " 

 (Journal of Agricultural Research, Washington, D.C., 



