Cancer Conclusions

For U. S. doctors, research problem No. 1 is cancer. No. 1 sleuth organization is the recently established National Advisory Cancer Council, a branch of the U. S. Public Health Service. Several months ago Surgeon General Thomas Parran appointed a committee of five eminent researchers* to correlate all the facts discovered about the cause and growth of cancer in the last 30 years. Last week the U. S. Public Health Service released the scientists' report. Significant facts:

>There is practically no difference in chemical make-up or physical structure between normal cells and cancer cells. Nor are cancer cells more sensitive to heat, cold, X-ray or radium than normal cells. Main difference between cancer cells and normal cells is that cancer cells are not subject to the body's discipline, but grow like wildfire.

>Cancer may be started by syphilis germs, certain viruses and tapeworms, or by application to the skin of simple chemicals (arsenic, chloride of zinc) and coal tar substances. But continued irritation does not cause cancer.

>A tendency to cancer in a specific organ may be inherited. Thus lung cancers run in some families, breast cancers in others.

At the conclusion of their study the scientists urged the Council to compile detailed medical histories of cancerous families. They also urged laboratory study of "the fundamental problem" in cancer: the origin of the "cell with a capacity for unlimited or uncontrolled growth." Private workers and agencies have "almost entirely neglected" this problem, and it is up to Government workers, concluded the scientists, to answer the crucial question: ". . . Is there a break in the internal control mechanism of the cell, or is there a loss in body control of cell activity?"

* Drs. Stanhope Bayne-Jones and Ross Granville Harrison of Yale, John Howard Northrop and James Bumgardner Murphy of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Clarence Cook Little, head of the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Me.

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