A team of medical researchers left New Orleans by air Saturday on a venture into one of the most primitive areas on earth.
The trip, if succssful, may move medical science closer to understanding one of mankind's most crippling diseases—atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries.
The six-man task force, a joint venture by the Louisiana State University School of Medicine and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest College in Winston Salem, N. C, will spend six weeks seeking monkeys in the dense jungles of Colombia.
"The principal purpose of the project is to determine accurately the prevalence, extent and severity of atherosclerosis lesions in several common species of new world monkeys as they occur in their natural habitat,'' Dr. Henrv C. McGill Jr., project co-director said. Dr. Thomas B. Clarkson, associate professor of the Department of Laboratory Animal Medicine at Wake Forest is also a director.
Plans call for trapping the animals, a majority of which will be autopsied in the field, with selected specimins to be returned live to the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans and to Wake Forest laboratories for long-term study.
Data will be used to choose species for further experimental work in atherosclerosis, and will serve as base line data for such experiments. McGill also said that ancillary aims and objectives of the project are to determine the normal blood and tissue fat composition of the species, and to study the natural diseases and parasites of the animals.
Dr. Jorffe RosaL instructor of
pathology at LSU, and a Guatemalan physician, willhead advance field operations for the mission prior to arrival of the full research team.
Dr. Neil Tappen, associate professor of anatomy and physi-sical anthropology, Tulane University School of Medicine, also will go.
The group hopes to return to New Orleans in early September.
