The Relation of Iron and Copper to Hemoglobin Synthesis in the Chick.*

Shortly after we had demonstrated in this laboratory (1) that nutritional anemia could be induced in rabbits by a diet of cow’s whole milk, and that this anemia could not be corrected by inorganic iron unless it was supplemented with a natural food material, or a preparation from this material, we attempted to use chicks as experimental animals for anemia studies. A survey of the literature at that time indicated that chickens had been used rarely for studies of this nature. The only work found was that of Coppela, as he is quoted by Stockman (2), who was able to reduce the hemoglobin in cocks to 33 per cent by feeding a diet containing no iron and to increase it, in 5 days, to 65 per cent by the addition of ferric lactate. We were interested in using chicks because they are readily available laboratory animals and because we wished to obtain results with animals other than rabbits. Since that time rats have also been used in this laboratory (3) and it was the work with this animal which demonstrated the importance of copper as a supplement to iron for hemoglobin building (4). In this paper we wish to present some of the fundamental facts observed during the work with the chicks, and to give the results which demonstrated that copper has the same favorable effect upon the hemoglobin synthesis in the chick as it has in the rat.