The Price of a Trip?

"At birth the infant was limp. She died with severe respiratory distress at the age of nine hours. The infant weighed 5 Ibs. She had a sloping forehead, poorly differentiated, low-set ears, a broad nose with prominent bridge, and bilateral epicanthic folds. A slight fatty hump was noted at the nape of the neck. Both hands had simian creases. The left hand had four fingers (thumb and three fingers); a rudimentary sixth finger was attached to the right hand. The right foot showed a slight deformity. A roentgenogram taken after death showed eleven pair of thin ribs, absence of part of the sacrum, and dislocation of both hips . . ."

The unfortunate infant described in the Journal of the A.M.A. was born with equally severe internal problems. An autopsy showed that she had an enlarged right heart, two holes in the walls dividing the chambers of the heart, and a long catalogue of abnormalities involving the kidneys, lungs, liver, pancreas, digestive tract and genitalia. What had caused her horrible deformation?

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine doctors who reported the case, Lillian Y. Hsu, Lotte Strauss and Kurt Hirschhorn, found that the infant's cells contained an abnormal chromosome that was made up of two joined chromosomes. This extra chromosomal material had garbled the genetic message. Similar abnormalities are occasionally transmitted to a child from a parent who has no history of possible genetic damage from radiation or other causes. In those rare cases, the parent's body cells contain the defective chromosome; it is an inherited abnormality. But no such chromosome was found in the body cells of either the father or the mother of the deformed infant. Something must have happened during the parents' lifetime to change the chromosomes in their germ cells, either the father's sperm or the mother's ova --most likely the ova. That something may well have been identified by the Mount Sinai doctors. The mother, the doctors found, had taken three doses of LSD nine months before her infant was conceived. The father had taken two doses a few years earlier.

"While coincidence cannot be excluded," say the doctors, "the possibility of chromosome damage to germ cells by LSD, with production of abnormal offspring, must be emphasized."

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