(3 of 4)
Unitarian Defense. What happens when a man or animal is immunized to a specific infection from outside? Bacteriologists have long known that in the blood are produced antibodies which kill off the invading organisms. They have supposed that in this struggle fixed tissues like the skin are helpless bystanders. Dr. Reuben Leon Kahn, director of the University of Michigan's clinical laboratories, questioned this theory. He has harried hundreds of immunized rabbits by injecting toxins and antitoxins into their skins, muscles, bellies, brains, blood. Last week he made known results and conclusions indicating that, though current immunization procedure need not be changed, immunization theory must be drastically overhauled.
When a bacterial suspension is injected into the skin of an animal previously rendered immune to that bacterium, the local inflammation is much more than in the case of a nonimmune creature. This, according to most bacteriologists, is because the skin is hypersensitive and is the prey of toxic products thrown off in the battle between the bacteria and blood-borne antibodies. Wrong, said Dr. Kahn. Independently of the circulating antibodies, possibly even before they get into action, the skin cells themselves locate and combat the invader, and that combat causes inflammation. Dr. Kahn found that this pugnacity of the skin is ten times that of the blood; that other fixed tissues such as the peritoneum, muscles and brain are also, and in that order, more active in defense than the blood; that the skin reaction persists after the combative quality of the blood has disappeared.
Said Dr. Kahn: "One should necessarily be cautious when discussing the significance of data which tend to upset accepted views in a field of science." Dr. Kahn was cautious because his rabbits are not men. Nevertheless the same phenomena attend the immunization of rabbits and men. According to Dr. Kahn, the conclusion is inescapable that immunization is not a mere production of antibodies in the blood, but, through an actual change in other tissues, is a "unitarian" response in the whole body. So impressed was the Association by these findings that to Lithuanian-born Dr. Kahn, 46, went the eleventh annual award of $1,000 for the meeting's most noteworthy paper.
Sideshow. The scientists had something on tap besides talk. Through the stained-glass windows of Harvard's murky old Memorial Hall light streamed in on a great array of exhibits. Among them:
¶ Stereopticon slides brought by airplane from Caltech by Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, making visible in three dimensions the paths of positive & negative electrons kicked out of atomic nuclei by cosmic rays.
¶ Bell Telephone Laboratories' automatic telephone-message taker. The sender's voice activates two small magnets which impress a varying magnetization on a moving steel ribbon. The ribbon gives up its message when it is played through a second magnet set.
¶ A centrifuge, microscope & camera hookup from Princeton's biological laboratories which photographs minute bits of germ plasm being whirled at 24,000 r.p.m.
¶ The "Visagraph," which enables the blind to enjoy books printed in ordinary type. A photoelectric cell scans the page, controls a mechanism which reproduces the type in raised form on aluminum foil.