Lankenau Experimenter

In answer to an assembly call by Clarence Cook Little, Lieutenant Colonel of the U. S. Army Specialist Reserves and director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, who is now zealously organizing a Women's Field Army against Cancer, squads of Pennsylvania women trooped to Philadelphia last week to be told that cancer is curable if detected early, to be urged to spread this word to other women. While these women were busy being told how to avoid death from cancer, Dr. Grace Medes, 49, of Philadelphia's Lankenau Hospital Research Institute wondered whether the strange sulfur sprees upon which she periodically goes will ever give her a cancer.

Two years ago this woman, a University of Kansas Master of Arts (1914), a Bryn Mawr Ph. D. (1917), onetime professor at the University of Minnesota, stocked her laboratory with a 25-lb. can of rice, can upon can of corn syrup and started a series of week-long dietary experiments. For four days she eats only two cups of boiled rice and corn syrup in small doses. This eliminates sulfur compounds from her system to such an extent that none can be detected in her blood or what she modestly euphemizes as "other fluids." On the fifth day she takes a half-teaspoonful of cystine, cysteine, d-1-methionine, l-methionine, cystine-disulfoxide, sulfonic acid or cysteic acid, the seven body sulfur compounds crystallized by Lankenau's Chemist Gerrit Toennies. For the next 24 to 36 hours Miss Medes remains alone and foodless in her laboratory taking samples of her blood every half-hour, other fluids whenever possible. The week-long experiment over, she then goes to her boarding house, a block away from her laboratory, to recover from starvation with a three-day diet of fruit juices, cereals ("except rice"), eggs. On the fourth day she has "a big juicy steak" and a romp with her only Philadelphia companion, a wire-haired terrier named Whiskers, from whose loin Miss Medes six years ago removed a kidney. Last week Miss Medes was vacationing from a November spree, will go on another after New Year's.

Some sulfur compounds cause body cells to grow extraordinarily fast, and are used regularly in medicine to hasten the healing of sores and wounds. Such substances may in some way be connected with the unknown physiological accidents which give rise to cancer. On the other hand, other sulfur compounds inhibit growth. These may be the body's regular protective guard against cancer. Miss Medes has made it her job to find out the answer to this phase of the cancer question, no matter what the cost. Thus far the brave scientist has discovered in her body none of the lumps, malaise, sores, cachexia that harbinger the world's most frightful blight. Said she last week: "I don't mind being a guinea pig. But I do mind being called one."

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