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15  The Brains of the Matter
    The Washington Post, Sunday, October 30, 1966

     The human brain is the focus of man's scientific introspection.
His three pounds of gray and white matter are the very tool of that
insight; how this organ develops is the ultimate secret of human
nature.

     Knowing this, I am astonished at how thinly this field of biology
is explored.  Philosophy aside, the texture of life is the interaction
of brains.  The transactions are mainly verbal, educational and
persuasive; the exchange of symbols signifying love, threat or
information.

     Primitively, brain deals with brain as if they were not matter
at all, but pure consciousness.  Nevertheless, brain is matter: it
can be befuddled by alcohol or narcotic drugs and consciousness
will cease when gray matter is mashed by a bullet.  But for every
battalion of students of the development of personality there may
be only a lonely worker on the physical and chemical development
of the material brain.  Nor is any other organ of the human body
more poorly analyzed than this central one.

     These remarks are inspired by a report by Dr. Stephen Zamenhof,
a biochemist at UCLA medical school, published last June in Science
magazine.  His first observations were published 25 years ago.

     His recent publication is a corroboration of his previous report
on the effects of pituitary growth hormone on brain development in
rats.  Pregnant rats were injected with the hormone daily for the
latter two weeks of their three-week term.  The litters of these
and untreated ones were carefully studied as newborns and at 20 days
of age.  The treated offspring showed an increase in brain weight
of 17 to 30 per cent, and even larger increases in the proportion
of neurons in the cortical gray matter.

     More highly purified hormone was used in the latest experiment,
brain DNA was also shown to be augmented and more careful attention
was paid to the kinds of cells found in the brain.  A British team,
B. G. Clendinnen and J. T. Eayrs, had essentially repeated Zamenhof's
results in 1961, together with evidence of "intellectual" improvement,
which is also supported by one other study.  I do not know of any
published criticisms.

     These findings have extraordinary implications, being the first
toehold on the normal developmental control of the size of the brain.
The human baby would be severely taxed at birth by a brain larger
than has already evolved.  But modern obstetrics lets us sidestep
the constraint on intellectual evolution imposed by the female pelvis.
Of course, we would first have to understand the impact that enlarging
the brain has on personality.

     Growth hormone is one of the most obscure secretions of the
pituitary and we know much less about its normal function than of
the hormones that regulate the adrenal or the sex glands.  However,
variations in growth hormone are probably interwoven with many
diseases -- diabetes may be the most interesting -- and we could start
a fascinating contemplation of the impact of these diseases on brain
development of the young.  More generally, we know almost nothing
of the biological foundations of the observed variation in human
brains, and we have no better lead than Zamenhof's observations.

     The report is, however, almost painfully tantalizing.  For such
a critical question, we would want overwhelming corroboration.  The
experiments were not double-blind.  A great deal of drudge work has
doubtless already been planned to pin down the dose requirements and
the timing for greatest effect.  There is hardly any proof that this
effect is specific, and many other proteins might do the same.  Since
pituitary from cattle was used, the pregnant rats might have developed
immunity to growth hormone.  The behavioral consequences need the
most careful further study.

     Some of our ablest scientists in related fields are repelled from
working on notorious subjects: those over-exposed to the public lime-
light and offering no chance of calm deliberation, but which may
have the most dramatic impact on human affairs.  But brains are an
irresistible target for our best brains to study.

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