C0KI6RATULAT10N5 ' I 'Chipper Wallet’ Is Now a P.A.
TO U5 GRADS' / ■ ■
FI?OM
PHVSICIAN'S ASSOCIATE
CHIPPER WALLET
CLASS of '73
Dick Moores isn't a man who lets the
tinfies pass him by.
He can't afford to.
As the writer and artist of "Gasoline
Alley," which was the first American
comic strip in which the characters aged,
Moores has to keep current.
That's why, late in 1970, he made a
DO YOU REMEMBER CH!PPER?-Mter
being introduced to INTERCOM readers
two years ago as a Physician's Associate
student. Chipper Wallet is now ready for
graduation. In fact hundreds of thousands
of newspaper readers across the country
have been following the build-up all week
to Chipper's graduation today in the
"Gasoline Alley" comic strip. This
pen-andnnk of Chipper was drawn for
INTERCOM by "Gasoline Alley" artist
Dick Moores. For more details on the
relationship between Chipper and Duke,
see the accompanying story.
trip over to Duke from his home at
Fairview outside of Asheville to have a
talk with Dr. Robert Howard, who was
then director of the Physician's Associate
Program.
Moores explained that in his "Gasoline
Alley" family, the Wallets, there was a
young man. Chipper, who was just
coming back from service in Vietnam as a
military corpsman. Moores was interested
in having Chipper profit from his military
medical experience and become a PA.
The idea delighted Howard and others
at the PA Program, and they spent a day
talking with Moores, answering his
questions and letting him observe PA
classroom work and training so he could
satisfy his own demand for authenticity
in the strip.
Over the following months Moores
worked the PA idea into his strip and
Chipper applied to the program. He
received his letter of acceptance on July
nteucom
duke uniycusity mcdicM ccnteR.
VOLUME 20, NUMBER 35
AUGUST 31, 1973
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
Duke Researchers Develop
Diagnostic Hypertension Aid
Duke researchers desaibed last week a
procedure which could aid in the early
diagnosis of hypertension or high blood
pressure, a condition which afflicts more
than 23 million Americans.
The test offers the possibility of
identifying hypertensive persons even
before they begin to show the usual
symptoms.
The presentation was made at the fall
meeting of the American Society for
Pharmacology and Experimental
Therapeutics at Michigan State University
in East Lansing.
The U.S. government recently
launched an all-out program to' try to
prevent the thousands of unnecessary
deaths in tljis country each year from
heart failure, stroke or kidney disease as a
result of high blood pressure. The
condition can be controlled by drugs, but
government figures show that at least half
of the 23 million people who have high
blood pressure don't even know it.
The procedure used by Duke
researchers involves measuring the
amount of an. enzyme called
dopamine-B-hydroxylase or DBH in a
person's blood and comparing it with the
blood DBH level of normal persons.
"One of the exciting things about this
test is that we can pick out people that a
doctor would have a hard time
identifying as hypertensive because the
blood pressure is unstable and there may
be no other symptoms", said Dr. Saul M.
Schanberg, professor of pharmacology
and principal investigator on the project.
Schanberg said the test is based on a
theory that hypertension is related to an
overfunctioning of the sympathetic
nervous system. The sympathetic nerves
are part of the body's involuntary
nervous system and are responsible
partially for maintaining blood pressure
and heart rate. This occurs through the
release of a hormone, noradrenaline, at
the nerve ending.
If the amount of this hormone in the
blood stream could be measured easily,
doctors would have an accurate method
of measuring whether the sympathetic
nervous system was overfunctioning. But
the hormone is rapidly changed as it
circulates through the body, making it
hard to determine what level is normal.
But there is another substance released
into the bloodstream by the nerves along
with the noradrenaline that can be,
measured-DBH. DBH is an enzyme
which catalyzes or helps in the creation
of noradrenaline. The enzyme is not
rapidly destroyed in the bloodstream, and
investigators believed it could be an
accurate measure of whether the body's
blood pressure control system was
functioning properly.
Other investigators had tried in the
past to correlate DBH levels with
hypertension, but they had found such a
wide range of DBH levels in the blood of
apparently normal subjects that it was
, not possible to use the test as a diagnostic
tool.
Schanberg and his co-workers, Richard
Stone, Norman Kirshner, J. Caulie
Gunnels and Roscoe R. Robinson, at first
got the same wide range of results as the
other investigators. They measured the
DBH levels in the blood of 82 apparently
healthy subjects between the ages of 22
and 35 and came up with values ranging
from two to 100 units of DBH per liter of
blood.
But in checking over the data,
Schanberg found that the subjects fell
principally into two groups. Sixty-two of
the subjects-or 76 per cent-had DBH
values below 35. Thirteen of the other
20, or 16 per cent, had values over 60.
The researchers then took subjects
from the high group and from the low
and tested them further. Over a period of
a week, the researchers kept records of
the subjects' blood DBH levels, blood
pressure and the amount of
catecholamjnes (such as noradrenaline) in
(Continued on page 2)
WELDER WIELDS WANING
SPARKS—BeW Building's new air
conditioning unit nears completion as
certified welder Samuel Wheeler, from
Lee's Welding Steel Service in Durham,
puts some finishing touches on a guard
rail around the fan unit. Abbott Lloyd,
general superintendent of the medical
center's Department of Engineering and
Operations, said the 75-ton unit is
designed to handle central air
conditioning and heating for the front
end of Bell Building's first, second and
third floors. From trades helpers to
insulators, more than 50 people have
been instrumental in putting the unit
together for operation. (Photo by Dale
Moses}
10, 1971, and started to PA classes in
September of that year.
True to his demand for authenticity,
Moores left Chipper in the PA Program
for the full two years. Several segments of
the strip over that time were devoted to
Chipper's training, and he found himself
facing some of the same suspicions
real-life PAs sometimes do.
Once, for example, when starting to
conduct a preliminary examination on
one patient while the doctor was seeing
another, the patient objected: "Wait a
minute! No young punk is going to
examine me! Where's Doc?"
But, also as real-life PAs do. Chipper
demonstrated his skill and training and
convinced the patient of his value as an
assistant to the physician.
Cartoonists must prepare their strips
and send them to the syndicate that
distributes them weeks and months in
advance. Moores tries to keep 12 weeks
ahead.
Several months ago, he called
INTERCOM one day to check on the
graduation date for the PA Class of '73,
which is Chipper's class. He also inquired
about the type program conducted at the
graduation and the setting for the
ceremonies.
He was told that the Duke PA
graduation would be in August, that there
would be a guest speaker and that the
ceremonies would be in the Gross
Chemical Laboratory Auditorium, which
was described to him.
The scene of Chipper's graduation,
which is the subject of today's strip in the
approximately 200 newspapers that carry
"Gasoline Alley," shows a speaker
addressing the graduation audience in a
large auditorium.
Aside from his PA link to Duke,
Moores has some other ties here. His
daughter Sara earned a Master of Arts in
Teaching here in 1969, and his son Bill,
now a heart surgeon, got his bachelor's
degree here in 1962.
(While working on a road gang during
a summer break at Duke, Bill was bitten
by a rattlesnake. The surgeon in the Duke
emergency room who treated him was Dr.
William G. Aniyan, now vice president for
health affairs.)
What will Chipper do now that he's a
PA? Moores said he plans for him to
continue working with "Doc," the
general practitioner in his home town
which has never been given a name in the
strip.
"Gasoline Alley" was started more
than 50 years ago by the late Frank King,
with whom Moores worked until he took
over the daily strip in 1960. Before
becoming associated with King, his other
work had included five years with Chester
Gould, the creator of "Dick Tracy," and
14 years with Walt Disney drawing the
"Uncle Remus" page and later "Scamp."
Moores produces "Gasoline Alley" for
the Monday-Saturday newspapers. The
Sunday strip is produced by Bill Perry of
Orlando, Fla.
-JOE SIGLER
Monday, September 3
Labor Day
Holiday
Labor Day unofficially marks the end of the summer vacation season. A
story on Page 3 takes a look at this thing we call vacation and tells how some
of the people around the medical center spent theirs.