DESPITE increasingly intensive research over a period of 70 years for a "biochemical lesion" in schizophrenias, none of the many reported has been found to be both reproducible and relevant.1,2 The very recent demonstration of the presence of 3,4-dimethylphenylethylamine in urine3 may prove to be the first exception; the present report is submitted concerning a potential second.
In 1947 Sjovall4 reported that mice who died after intravenous injection of serum of schizophrenics had hemoglobinuria. This hemoglobinuria could be prevented by heating serum to 56 C for 30 minutes without, however, destroying toxicity. Other authors, earlier, had reported a decrease in toxicity upon heating serum.5,6 No one seems to have connected these observations to the long-studied phenomenon of heterophil antibodies,7,8 although lethal action of heterologous serum injected into veins of another species had been supposed to be due to antibody-antigen