Cancer University

Manhattan's huge Memorial Hospital, now the world's biggest cancer center, calls itself the first "cancer university." Its faculty includes surgeons, physicians, chemists, mathematicians, physicists, atomic scientists. Its students are cancer specialists from nearly every nation on earth. Its subject of study: more than 17,000 patients a year.

Last week, in a quadrennial report, Memorial talked about plans for its opulent brick-and-stone "campus" rising near the East River. Founded in 1884,* Memorial is the oldest U.S. cancer hospital. But its expansion to a university began only two years ago, is still under way. Next door to its eight-year-old, Rockefeller-financed main building is its new Strang clinic (for prevention and early detection of cancer). Nearly finished: the $4,000,000 Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Also abuilding: a 300-bed municipal cancer hospital, which Memorial will operate. Among Memorial's ambitious plans: further additions, new equipment, a $200,000 Betatron (to be used for radiation treatments).

Memorial has no secret cures for cancer. Its staff has comparatively few world-renowned cancer fighters (one of the few: Surgeon Alexander Brunschwig, formerly of the University of Chicago (TIME, March 17). But its able, well-coordinated team is waging a hard-hitting campaign against cancer on four fronts--prevention, treatment, teaching, research.

The hospital has 78 fellows, all graduate students, in resident training. It has turned out 130 cancer specialists for work in the U.S. and 22 foreign countries.

At Memorial, as elsewhere, surgery, radium and X rays are still the basic, most successful treatments. Some 90% of Memorial's patients are operated on (the hospital's "fiveyear cure" rate for stomach cancer: 25%). But Memorial is also pioneering in hormones for breast and prostate cancers, radioactive iodine for thyroid cancers, nitrogen mustards for Hodgkin's disease, radioactive phosphorus for certain forms of leukemia, a urine test for early cancer detection, studies of an extract of the adrenal gland, which looks like a hopeful candidate against stomach cancer.

In one grim field, the university is pioneering almost alone. Memorial has the nation's only hospital ward for children with cancer. With only 17 beds, the ward has long waiting lists. And each month some 290 treatments are given to young cancer patients in the hospital's crowded clinic. Memorial's doctors admit that children's cancers are among the most baffling (and most tragic) of all, and that "the mortality rate ... is extremely high."

* By Mr. & Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mrs. Elizabeth Cullum, a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton.

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