Rabbit Skin, Chicken Cells

The news about cancer to which reputable specialists pay attention is not wild announcements of a sure cure for all types of the disease, but sober reports of cancer facts dug up in laboratories and hospitals which may eventually, by long hard work, lead to a cancer cure. Last week cancer researchers in the U. S., working harder than ever because of new organizations and contributions paid attention to some new cancer facts reported from France and England.

If cancer cells of the type called Ehrlich sarcoma are ground up, made into an emulsion and injected beneath the skins of mice, the animals invariably die. Drs. Alexandre Besredka and Ludwik Gross of the Pasteur Institute in Paris made small, weak doses of finely minced sarcoma tissue, injected them not beneath but in the skins of mice. In most of the animals metastases (cancer colonizations elsewhere in the body) took place and death followed. But in 10% the skin tumor caused by the injection dried up and disappeared and thereafter the mice were immune to that type of sarcoma. The percentage of tumor disappearances and subsequent immunities was doubled by barely pricking the freshly shaved skin with a needle which had been dipped in the cancer emulsion.

Even better results were obtained with rabbit carcinoma. When the rabbits were inoculated in the skin, the resulting tumors invariably disappeared and the animal was thereafter immune. It was evident that in the rabbit's blood some antibody had been generated which dried up the skin tumor and provided lasting protection. Similar experiments with chickens, however, failed.

Some light on the failure with chickens was cast by Dr. William Ewart Gye, director of Britain's Imperial Cancer Research Fund, who found that even in the blood of chickens with growing cancers there may be antibodies in amounts detectable by chemical means. "A hen may carry a tumor," he wrote, "and have at the same time more than enough of the immune body in its circulating fluids to neutralize the whole of the virus in its tumor, and the tumor nevertheless continues to grow." The reason appeared to be that the cancer virus takes refuge inside the body cells, where the antibody for some reason cannot penetrate. The chicken is thus in the unfortunate position of a military com-mander who has enough troops to wipe out an enemy if he could get them out of jail.

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