The Quest for Cortisone

Chapter 6. 1929 and the Decision to Hunt for Cortisone

53 Chapter 6 1929 and the Decision to hunt for Cortisone You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles. —sherLoCK hoLMes, “The BAsCoMBe VALLeY MYsTerY” The Great Depression kicked off with the stock market crash on Black Tuesday, october 29, 1929, and as a result most of the civilized world was soon feeling depressed. But not ernest hemingway. Life in 1929 was going surprisingly well for the testosterone-stoked writer. “Demon Depression,” which typically followed him as surely as the darkness of night follows day, could only bide its time for now. The future nobel Prize winner had just published an enormously successful novel, A Farewell to Arms. At the university of Chicago (just a few miles from hemingway’s place of birth and boyhood home), an overworked college underclassman from rochester, Minnesota, named Luis Alvarez was finding the time to read it.1 nor was depression an issue in 1929 for another man with nobel connections . in fact, 1929 was turning out to be the best year of frank B. Kellogg’s life. something was happening to Kellogg that would soon plunge the little collection of farms known as rochester, Minnesota—and the growing medical clinic that sat in its midst—into the international limelight, just as cortisone was destined to do decades later. frank Kellogg was born in Pottsdam, new York, on December 22, 1856.2 After the Civil War ended, many eastern families migrated westward; the 54| Chapter 6 Kelloggs were one of them. They moved to the small southeastern Minnesota town of elgin in 1865 and took up farming. Details regarding frank Kellogg’s education are sketchy; he attended a country school, but it is unclear whether he ever graduated. Around 1870, roughly thirteen years before the town would be flattened by the great tornado, he began working at a small law office in rochester, where he taught himself law along with history and the classic languages. Kellogg passed the state bar examination in 1877 and began practicing law. he was the city attorney for rochester for two years, and later became the attorney for the rest of olmsted County.3 Kellogg was elected to the u.s. senate in 1916, just in time to participate in America’s entry into World War i. his run for a second term in 1922 ended in defeat. But having tasted the sweet fruit of national politics, Kellogg was determined not to allow a mere election loss to remove him from public service. he left the senate and immediately became a professional diplomat under President Warren harding. After harding’s death in 1923, Kellogg was named ambassador to Britain by Calvin Coolidge, and later served as Coolidge’s secretary of state. from 1927 to 1929 Kellogg worked on “the adoption of a multilateral treaty renouncing war as an instrument of national policy,”4 which was eventually signed by sixty-four countries. Described by one senator as an insignificant “international kiss,”5 the treaty was predictably broken by armed conflict within a few months of its completion. frank Kellogg’s efforts were, nonetheless, recognized in norway and deemed worthy of the 1929 nobel Peace Prize.6 incredibly, the tiny city of rochester, with a population of just a few thousand , had produced a man who, despite his lack of formal education, became a u.s. senator, secretary of state, and the first of five rochester-affiliated nobel Prize winners. The population marveled over the unimaginable way in which the goddesses of good fortune and fame had just kissed the tiny Minnesota hamlet squarely on the lips. What no one realized in 1929 was that they had more sweet kisses to bestow. Albert von szent-Györgyi arrived at Mayo in the fall of 1929 and hit the ground running. Quickly obtaining a wooden press, large meat grinder, and numerous forty-gallon crocks,7 he began the demanding process of extracting hexuronic acid from the seemingly endless supply of bovine adrenal glands that were now available to him from the stockyards of st. Paul. it was messy, tedious, mindless toil; nevertheless, the hungarian tackled it with the passion of a man who realizes he has been given a rare, one-time 1929 and the Decision to Hunt for Cortisone| 55 opportunity to do something extraordinary. But things changed dramatically when the workday ended. outside the laboratory szent-Györgyi was an insatiable social butterfly; he...