Word: serum
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Attention centered first on Dr. Stig Akerfeldt, a boyish (27), blond biochemist from Stockholm's famed Nobel Institute, who had reported that when a certain chemical is added to a sample of blood serum, it will turn a bright red if the subject has schizophrenia or other severe mental illness. Akerfeldt's method has been touted as a "test" for schizophrenia. It is far from being that, since it also gives a red reaction with patients suffering from various infections, cancer, disorders of the liver, or even with women in the later months of pregnancy. But Akerfeldt...
Researcher Akerfeldt is clearly over that hurdle: in a jampacked meeting last week U.S. researchers said that they had duplicated his method with minor variations, adding a chemical called DPP (for N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylene diamine) to serum specimens and getting the red reaction from patients with serious mental illnesses and some other diseases. (One notable exception: patients who have had schizophrenia a long time.) Most promising positive use: the reaction seems to be clearest in children, whose emotional disorders are especially hard to diagnose-and who are not likely to have such misleading conditions as malaria or pregnancy...
...weaving perfect webs of traditional pattern. Dr. Bercel then gives it no food for a day. In the evening he offers it a doctored fly-one that he has killed without damaging its form and from which he has drained the blood. He replaces this with human blood serum taken from schizophrenic patients. Since the dead fly does not buzz or struggle, Dr. Bercel fools the spider into thinking that it is alive by twanging a tuning fork (middle C) near the web. The spider runs out, sinks its fangs into the fly and greedily sucks up its content...
Early morning is web-building time, so when Dr. Bercel opens the air-conditioned room the next day, he can tell at a glance how the spiders reacted to their meals. Most striking results so far have been seen in spiders fed with serum taken from patients suffering from the catatonic form of schizophrenia. The spiders seem to become catatonic too. They move listlessly and spend much time in their houses; the webs they spin are like the last vestiges of ragged lace. The spiders' reaction, like that of human volunteers injected with schizophrenic serum (TIME, May 14), shows...
Other kinds of schizophrenic serum produce effects on the webs that are not so obvious. Dr. Bercel's next step: to feed spiders on serum from former schizophrenic patients, now considered cured, to see whether the cure will extend to his spiders, leave them spinning perfect webs...