Cholesterol discovery wins Nobel prize

This is the week when, as usual, the Americans gobble up the Nobel Prizes for science or medicine, or both, though as often as not one one of them turns out to have been a refugee from Hitler's insane persecution of Jews and liberals, the only consoling result of which was to drive so many brilliant men to America and, let us not forget, with the aid of Einstein, Szilard, Teller and Wigner, get the atom bomb before Hitler did.

First came the news, though, that two native Americans, Michael Brown and Joseph Holstein who've been collaborating for 20 years or so at the University of Texas, had won the medical prize for discovering more accurately than anybody before how cholesterol works. And about time! I don't know how it is in your country, but for the past 25 years, at least, Americans have been obsessed with cholesterol, the fatty substance created, we were told, in the bloodstream by carbohydrates and animal fats and leading, sooner or later, to snags like silt piling up along a riverbed that could lead to a blockage or clot and give you a heart attack or a stroke or arteriosclerosis.

Well, I tell you, no sooner had this theory been seized on by the newspapers than the word 'cholesterol' gibbered through the land and there was a national retreat from pastries and beef and a parallel rush to eat only vegetable fats laced with soya bean. Then it was pointed out that soya bean was practically pure distilled salt, also lethal and the salt-free diet became the big thing. It still is. Then some perverse medical researcher found great virtue in carbohydrates and there was a special diet for that, too.

These dissenting voices led the doctors to withdraw their warnings about cholesterol – but not for long. The word is still as ominous as the word 'poison' on a bottle. And it's now part of the general, popular wisdom that the less fried foods, fats – especially animal fats – you eat, the quicker you will lower your cholesterol. In the past ten years, there has been a 15 per cent drop in the American consumption of meat.

The reminder, or the contention, of a doctor in California that the best a diet can do is reduce your cholesterol by about ten per cent only has not yet hit the populace. Nor has the fact that the body, itself, manufactures cholesterol; nor, certainly that some doctors attach more importance to the level of triglycerides than cholesterol. Triglycerides are not mentioned in the current Oxford Dictionary, nor even in my edition of the Churchill Livingstone Medical Dictionary, so let's not bring that up and start another national pandemonium.

Anyway, to cut short this painful – to beef lovers – painful subject, I ought to say that the Messrs Brown and Goldstein were apparently the first to suspect that high blood cholesterol could be inherited through those good old genes that seem to explain the puzzling longevity of sinners, as well as hinting at the even more puzzling origin of genius.

Now, even though they were looking into a condition that afflicts only about one in every 500 humans, by poking and dredging away at the bloodstream of victims and of the other 499, they discovered an important difference in the cells. Cholesterol is carried by a combination of fats and proteins. Let's call it just 'the carriers'. Now Brown and Goldstein discovered, and this was really new, that the cells of the human body have trappers lying in wait, or maybe hunting around, to catch the carriers of cholesterol and absorb its particles. People who have inherited high blood cholesterol either don't have these trappers, called now receptors, or have fewer of them. That's the whole story in a nutshell or a carrier. I hope we're all properly agog.

One of the world's leading molecular biologists said on Tuesday that the Brown and Goldstein discovery of receptors was magnificent and fundamental and has shed a great light revealing, for the first time, that the real problem turned out not to be in blood, but in cells and, in ways we don't luckily have to go into, the receptor discovery could lead to effective drugs for treating heart attacks and arteriosclerosis. Bully for Brown and Goldstein!

The next day we heard that another American, Dr Franco Modigliani, this time a refugee in 1939 from the other blusterer, Mussolini, had won the Nobel Economics Prize for – what do you think? – his pioneer work on finding out whether a company's financial worth is what it says it is and, also, for original work on when people save money and when they don't.

Now the mention of these two prizes may not seem anything like a coincidence to you, but to me, reported only a day apart, they immediately moulded into a, or melded, into a vivid picture a happy reflection of one of my closest friends. Let's call him Peter. A man who combines a passion for Mr Modigliani's specialty and a blissful indifference to the wisdom and expertise of the Messrs Brown and Goldstein.

Let's begin by saying he is dark and swarthy, full of gristle and energy, of a benevolent, almost slap-happy nature whose only grouch is that Japanese cameras are not what they're cracked up to be. Every picture they take, he complains, makes me look bald. He has been as bald as a bullet since about the age of 21. Being restless and playful, he hates to get into a golf game with old men and one day, last year, when I was otherwise occupied, he had to join a threesome of strangers. 'It was awful!' he said, 'There wasn't a guy under 60.'

He, by the way, is 80 but his rollicking, almost offensive, good health is due, I believe, to something for which there has not yet been a Nobel Prize. A study of how what you think you are affects the way you are. In Peter's case this means that without ever giving it a thought, he assumes he's about 45 and sometimes acts like a five-year-old, leaping – without permission of anybody around – into a hamburger and a glut of French fried potatoes the moment they appear.

His diet, indeed, consists mainly of meat and potatoes and bread and butter and milk and cheese and coffee and the random candy bars that other five-year-olds rattle out of slot machines. By all the cautionary theories of the doctors, for the past quarter-century, he should have exploded in a stroke or been slammed by a heart attack or, by now, be a heart-rending case of creeping paralysis.

In fact, he likes to hack away pruning trees and whatever length he delivers to a golf ball comes from forearms as thick as a blacksmiths. Whereas the late Bernard Darwin said about the immortal Bobby Jones that his golf swing had 'all the drowsy beauty of an English summer day', Peter's golf swing, it has often struck me, has all the drowsy beauty of a pneumatic drill.

The word 'cholesterol' has not the slightest interest for him and wouldn't have unless it signified, say, in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, a new word for collateral. Peter has been an investment banker now for over 50 years and he's heard about retirement but doesn't practise it. He once told me that if he had his life to go over again and, he added, I see no reason why not, he would choose exactly the same profession which he found absorbing from the start and still finds more exciting than anything, except possibly a 12-course meal at a Chinese restaurant.

Not just investment alone, but the whole business of budgeting money, especially by governments. Most of all, by the United States' government. Like many another, cheerful old codger, he sleeps, he says, about four hours a night. This, I believe, to be true. He forgets that, like Napoleon, he can take long, deep catnaps, ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour, an hour, at almost any hour of the day. The four hours at night is something of an automatic limit triggered to end by his concern for the United States' budget. I mean he gets up, marches – he is oblivious to the life around him, like a sleeping wife and so is incapable of tiptoeing – he marches into the sitting room, takes out the New York Times of the previous days whose editorial on the president's budget and the need to cut military spending he has deplored for the past 24 hours. He checks the figures in the editorial with the figures from the Pentagon, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics – he collects statistics as other youngsters collect rock tapes – and then he sits down and types a shrewd and ironical letter to the Times, pointing out, say, that the Times and the Democrats raise a fearful hullabaloo about the president's increasing military spending from 22 per cent to 28 per cent, but under John F. Kennedy every tax dollar included about 48 cents for military spending, but Kennedy was the peacemaker on the new frontier, while Reagan is a warmonger.

These letters, always about the Times's misunderstanding or deceptive reporting of budget matters are written about once a week. Peter has, in the dark watches of the night, relieved himself in the most agreeable way of any bile he has in his system. The administration has been defended, the managing editor chuckles, none of these letters is ever printed. They've been going on for ten years.

I once had to inform Peter on the phone of a dreadful accident to a friend. He was deeply horrified. I called back later to tell him it was nothing like so bad as we'd feared. He was taking a nap. I told his wife not to worry. 'About what?' she said. He had forgotten to tell her a thing about it. 'Good grief!' I said, 'Doesn't he think about anybody but you?' 'He doesn't think about me,' she said, 'he thinks only about the budget.'

What fascinates me, in the end, about Peter is his triumphant defiance of the accumulated wisdom of the medical profession through, no doubt, God-given genes, but also through his being too dumb to know or act his age and mainly through his unflagging enthusiasm for one odd specialty.

People's odd enthusiasms always fascinate me as well as our boredom with them. I remember Mrs Patrick Campbell's finding herself at dinner next to a professor who was a world expert on ants and at dinner could talk of nothing else. 'Not only', he went on, 'do they have slaves and carriers and apprentices and managers, they also have an army.'

She looked at him with a disdainful nostril. She said, 'No navy, I presume?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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