Word: heparin
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What to Do. Once they have an accurate diagnosis, doctors can decide what the patient needs. In the severest cases, surgery with the heart-lung machine is called for; in others, oxygen to tide patients over a crisis. But for most victims, drugs are enough: heparin to guard against the formation of new clots, norepinephrine to keep up the blood pressure. Dr. Wagner has high hopes for a new enzyme to dissolve old clots...
...driving go-getter, he says, cannot clear his bloodstream fast enough of the triglycerides which accumulate after a high-fat meal. Unlike the more placid man, the go-getter uses too much of his body's heparin to break up the fat. There is not enough heparin (nature's anticoagulant) left to keep the red blood cells apart: "If, after every meal, a man has too many fat particles going around and red cells sludging and obstructing small blood vessels, the heart may be temporarily so embarrassed that this man will have a heart attack without a clot...
...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...
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...