Episode 5 — The Founding Experiment

Anitschkow and Chalatow removed the food. In place of yolk, brain, or meat juice, they gave rabbits purified cholesterin dissolved in oil while ordinary vegetable feed continued: oil alone produced no essential organ changes, while cholesterin in oil filled the liver, spleen, marrow, and adrenal cortex with crystalline material within four to eight weeks — and began again, in the aortic wall, the intimal process of the earlier feeding experiments. Rats fed cholesterin-rich diets resisted the process, guinea pigs broadly reproduced it, and the human case was built not from a feeding trial but from deposits: Windaus’s lipoid material in atherosclerotic aortas, cholesterin in bile and gallstones, Chauffard’s clinical argument. The report was still in progress when it appeared, without a rabbit count and without a dose unit, and its title named experimental cholesterin steatosis rather than atherosclerosis. The suspect had been separated from the foods and tested, but the arterial model that carried its name was not yet built.