Word: werthessen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mile Reaction. This discovery, made in April of 1956, set Holman and his visitor, Dr. Nicholas T. Werthessen, jumping like baboons with excitement. Its importance lay in the fact that previously (except for rare cases in monkeys and expensive great apes) no animal had been known to develop arterial disease like a human being's, despite ingenious laboratory tricks. Researchers have learned much from rabbits, rats and chickens, but findings from these lower forms of life cannot be applied simply and directly to human diseases. The baboon, despite its lousy pelt, its foul temper and its embarrassingly lurid hind...
Kenya. Dr. Werthessen, from San Antonio's Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, made an aerial trip to Kibwezi, on Kenya's equatorial highlands. There he joined four of Hoi-man's associates, led by Dr. Henry C. McGill Jr., on the happy hunting grounds of the dog-faced baboon (Papio anubis). They hired a trapper with native bushwhackers to collect baboons...
...would have cost too much to ship many adult baboons (up to 60 Ibs. each) to the U.S., but luck was with Dr. Werthessen. He learned by chance that a Texas zoo had a surplus stock of dog-faced baboons-they had been bred in the zoo for 20 years, and the pack had had only two "old men" to sire all the offspring. This line breeding gave them a start toward genetic purity-a most desirable quality in research animals...
Physiologist Werthessen was doing experiments with baboons and their aortas to answer a host of questions about the effect of fats in the diet on the amount of fats (especially cholesterol) in the blood. In one especially tricky procedure he hooked up a baboon's freshly removed aorta with a heart-lung machine and used radioactive sodium acetate to find out how much fat is manufactured in the walls of the aorta itself. With a small branch baboonery at L.S.U., Dr. Holman was tackling related problems. Both hoped to get vital information with a direct bearing on human heart...