Cancer News

During the last ten years the number of clinics and hospitals specially built to fight cancer has increased from 13 to over 200. In its advanced stages the disease is still incurable, but now a few experiments of kitchen-simplicity lend hope to sufferers.

In Yale University's Medical School, two years ago, Biologist Leonell Clarence Strong fed oil of wintergreen to laboratory mice with cancerous tumors of the breast. Some of the tumors melted away. The thing that did the trick was the active principle of wintergreen oil, heptyl aldehyde, a fragrant, colorless liquid. With the help of his colleague, Leon Fradley Whitney, Dr. Strong then set to work on dogs. In last week's Science the biologists revealed the following promising results: injection of small amounts of fresh heptyl aldehyde under the skin of ten dogs with various types of spontaneous tumors produced "softening of the tumors in all dogs . . . except one. . . . Following periods of softening and draining of clear fluid, the tumors as a rule . . . gradually disappeared." Especially elated were Scientists Strong & Whitney over the recovery of two eight-year-old bitches with advanced cancer of the breast, one a cocker spaniel, the other a Scottish terrier.

Dogs are physiologically similar to humans, but the scientists warned laymen not to leap prematurely to an optimistic conclusion. Said they: "The proper analysis and evaluation of the present data must wait until statistically significant numbers are obtained."

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