Word: salmone
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Domestic and Cosmic. "Consider for instance the small scene just underneath the curve of the ceiling between the Prophet Jeremiah and the Sibyl Persica. This triangular picture shows the family of Salmon, one of the ancestors of Jesus. Here, the child leans upon his mother's knee and watches her cutting cloth with a big pair of shears. The pull of the fabric points your eye to something which is happening near by. Glancing up and to the right, you meet with the image in which God the Creator divides Light from Darkness. You are witnessing the same thing...
...Fuel. Aboard the Alpha Helix, Biochemist Eberhard Trams of the National Institutes of Health discovered that the brain's control of the pituitary gland was a major factor in the sudden aging of the salmon. As the fish enters fresh water, he found, the pituitary quickly grows to more than twice its normal size, and the central nervous system fails to maintain control. The gland then triggers a metabolic speedup that burns away practically all of the fat in the salmon's body. Biochemist Andrew Benson, associate director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains...
...effect of the fresh water, says Benson, is to stimulate the production of a hormone that causes calcium to dissolve out of the bones. The bloodstream is thus supplied with calcium that is no longer available from the calcium carbonate in ocean water-but the cost is high. The salmon's bones soften and virtually dissolve...
Clogging the Arteries. Both the pituitary gland changes and the loss of bone calcium in salmon are also familiar symptoms of aging in humans. "But in the fish," says Biochemist Trams, "the gland goes to hell in two weeks, a process that takes some 20 to 40 years in man." Thus the salmon makes an "ideal laboratory tool" for the investigation of geriatric ailments...
...salmon, Benson suggests, may eventually provide researchers with clues to methods for lessening the ravages of aging and with new knowledge of arteriosclerosis, which is caused at least in part by high concentrations of cholesterol in the bloodstream. In the ocean, the salmon has from five to ten times as much cholesterol in its bloodstream as a human can tolerate. "If we find out how the salmon manages to survive with this much cholesterol," says Benson, "perhaps we can help humans survive also...