34 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX. No. 1254 



started and many a great victory is a promise 

 of the complete triumph that must ultimately 

 come. I shall attempt to outline for you three 

 of the greatest problems which chemistry is 

 facing in a titanic effort to invade and explore 

 to its minutest parts nature's most precious 

 domain — life: the problem of the synthetic 

 remedy, the problem of the specific remedy, 

 and greatest of all, the problem of living 

 matter. 



A brief survey of the development of our 

 power to produce and control local anesthesia 

 may serve to illustrate the kind of service 

 chemistry is trying to render medicine in the 

 domain of the synthetic remedy. The dis- 

 covery of the effect of cocaine in removing by 

 a simple local application all sense of pain 

 where it has been applied, is, I believe, con- 

 sidered one of the great blessings of modem 

 medicine, an aid to the surgeon, no less than 

 a godsend to the patient. When cocaine was 

 first exploited, there were two serious draw- 

 backs to its use; one, its great cost — it was 

 said to be worth its weight in gold — which 

 necessarily limited its employment; the other, 

 its poisonous character, by reason of which 

 there were occasional fatalities connected with 

 its employment. The story of the exploration 

 of the structure of the molecule of cocaine, 

 like that of indigo, is for the chemist a most 

 thrilling and romantic tale — great chemists 

 made advances, only to meet with iiltimate 

 defeat — exactly as great explorers did in the 

 investment of the secrets of the domain of the 

 North Pole or of the heart of Africa — until 

 finally the penetrating genius of Eichard Will- 

 staetter succeeded in reaching the great goal. 

 The results of these investigations are found 

 not only in the fact that medicine has now a 

 host of valuable substitutes for cocaine, which 

 have powerful anesthetic properties without 

 dangerous secondary effects but even more 

 than the gain in materia medica is this : in 

 the conquest of the world of color it was found 

 that color is primarily due to certain specific 

 groups of atoms in the molecules of dyes, or 

 rather, vice versa, that specific combinations 

 of a few atoms in the molecules of compounds 

 give specific properties and functions to these 



compounds. This is, of coui'se, really a funda- 

 mental law of chemistry revealed again in so 

 complex a field as dyes. Now, exactly the 

 same kind of specificity should be found in 

 medicaments — that is, each specific function 

 should be fomid to be the result of the presence 

 of perfectly specific groups of atoms in the 

 molecules of the medicaments. It is this ap- 

 plication of the principles of pure chemistry 

 which we can follow in the planned production 

 of new and better local anesthetics and it is 

 this application which points the way to one of 

 the greatest lines of research for chemistry in 

 the service of medicine — to determine by ex- 

 haustive investigation the peculiarities of an 

 atomic group which will give the clean phys- 

 iological effects which every physician would 

 like to have at hand in the treatment of dis- 

 ease. The path would thus be eventually 

 opened to a truly scientific materia medica. 

 In the dyes we have been able to control sec- 

 ondary effects, such as stability or fluorescence, 

 and we have every reason to believe that chem- 

 istry can accomplish the same results and 

 avoid untoward secondary effects in the prob- 

 lem of obtaining specific physiological effects. 



The tremendous development of the produc- 

 tion of so-called synthetic remedies is the 

 visible manifestation of the application of 

 chemistry to the kind of research I have out- 

 lined. A large part of this manufacture of 

 synthetic drugs is, no doubt, of no permanent 

 value, a far too large a portion is unquestion- 

 ably even detrimental to the best interests of 

 medicine as the result of claims that are, to 

 say the least, too sanguine and often without 

 an adequate basis of fact. Again the lure of 

 gold is marring while stimulating this great 

 effort in behalf of mankind. But that real 

 progress has been made has been amply dem- 

 onstrated by the situation in this country in 

 the matter of synthetic drugs, resulting from 

 our war with Germany : this has separated the 

 wheat from the chaff and shown that there 

 indeed are a number of drugs, invented by 

 chemistry, which may be considered vital in 

 the treatment of disease. 



The second line of research in the applica- 

 tion of these methods of chemistry to the prob- 



