Viewing page 5 of 7

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:08:40]
{SPEAKER name="Melville H. Manson"}
to be located adjacent to the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center. This will be in the form of laboratories entirely, and providing space for some 40 or 50 post-doctoral scientists with the necessary ancillary help to devote themselves to finding the cause and an effective treatment for muscular dystrophy and related diseases.

[00:09:07]
{SPEAKER name="Watson Davis"}
This is a sort of a specialized attack upon this disease in special situations, sort of a crash attack, as it were.

[00:09:16]
{SPEAKER name="Melville H. Manson"}
Well, in - you could characterize it that way. The institute will not supplant but rather will supplement our grant-in-aid program and I think the principal reason for concentrating this attack is space. Our universities and our scientific institutions do not have adequate space nor do the investigators have time to devote entirely to investigations of this type.

[00:09:45]
{SPEAKER name="Watson Davis"}
I think I'd ask you, Dr. Manson, about this muscular dystrophy is a crippling disease, isn't it? How would you compare it with polio, and which is also, in some of its phases, a crippling disease?

[00:10:00]
{SPEAKER name="Melville H. Manson"}
The principal difference, Mr. Davis, is between the crippling and disabling effects of poliomyelitis and a number of other similar diseases and the muscular dystrophy is that they are primarily a disease of the central nervous system with a secondary effect upon the muscles. And in most instances, once the disability has become static, so to speak, it remains so and is amenable to surgical and orthopedic measures for correction. Muscular dystrophy, on the other hand, is definitely a progressive, disabling disease.