Word: heparin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wrong bottle and drank 2 oz. of oil of wintergreen. He was soon in convulsions and a raging fever, and threatened with death from brain damage. Rushed to Bellevue Hospital, he was stretched out beside the artificial kidney, which was primed with two pints of blood containing heparin to prevent clotting. Attending doctors from Cornell University put a cannula into the radial artery in the patient's wrist, connected this by polyethylene tubes with the core of the artificial kidney. Key part of this core: cellophane tubing of ordinary sausage-casing size. From the core, other tubes led back...
...they reached the lungs. That was 20 years ago. Schulte's physician, Dr. Irving Wright, casting around for a drug to prevent clot formation (none had yet been proved effective in man), appealed to Nobel Prizewinner Charles H. Best, co-discoverer of insulin. He wanted some of the heparin that University of Toronto laboratories had just begun to extract from beef lungs and liver. Dr. Best sent all he could spare...
...little more than two weeks, Patient Schulte's condition improved and the clotting appeared checked. Since then he has had infrequent, mild recurrences, has led an active life. From the presidency of Park & Tilford, Arthur Schulte moved to investment banking in Wall Street. Last week, in gratitude for heparin's help, ex-Patient Schulte footed the bills for a Manhattan conference staged by the New York Heart Association on progress in anticoagulant drugs...
From Rotten Clover. Heparin has had a distinguished history since Schulte's early case, has proved invaluable in a variety of conditions where clotting is a danger, notably after a patient has already had a heart attack or stroke from a thrombus (clot). Heparin's advantage over most rival anticlotting drugs: it acts immediately. Its disadvantages: it is expensive and must be injected under the skin or infused into a vein...
While physicians were learning to make the best use of heparin, Agriculturist Karl Paul Link and fellow researchers at the University of Wisconsin discovered another potent anticoagulant, dicoumarin, in rotted sweet clover (TIME, Feb. 14, 1944), which had been killing cattle. It is still widely used for long-term treatment of thrombosis patients, because it can be given handily by mouth. But the Wisconsin labs have synthesized more than 100 related substances, and one of these, Link suggested, would make a safe and deadly rat poison. He was right. Named warfarin,* it is usually applied to bait grain. Unsuspecting rats...