The Anti-Social Cells

Scientists have long known that there is some electrical activity in the body, and that a change in the normal action may be a warning of disease. The knowledge has been used to diagnose ailments of the heart (by electrocardiograph) and of the brain (by electroencephalograph). Could the same principle be applied to cancer?

Fifteen years ago, Yale Anatomist Harold Saxton Burr and New York University Gynecologist Louis Langman began to experiment with electrical tests for cancer. They had Yale Physicist Cecil T. Lane build a special microvoltmeter, which measures electrical potentials in microvolts (one-millionth of a volt). Last week, Researchers Burr and Langman announced preliminary results in diagnosing* cancer of the female genital tract.

In the test, one electrode is placed against the abdomen, the other inserted into the vagina. If the patient has cancer in the genital tract (or is pregnant, or has certain nonmalignant tumors), the needle on the microvoltmeter dial swings to the left of the center line. If not, it swings toward the right. At Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, cancer was detected in 74 out of 75 cases of women found by other tests to have cancer. Of 616 women shown to have no cancer by the test, only five were later found actually to have the disease. The Burr-Langman test cannot give the final word, say its inventors, but is an "adjunct" or helper test for other more complicated methods. It can be made in 25 minutes, may eventually prove useful in detecting cancer in other parts of the body.

The fact that cancer cells make a difference measurable in electricity may be a clue to the nature of cancer. A possible explanation lies not in the cancer cells themselves, but in the relation between cancer and normal cells. Cancer cells are "antisocial" or "immoral" and run wild in the body; the test may measure the resulting disturbance. It is possible, Drs. Burr and Langman speculated in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, that cancer is a defect "in the design of the organism." If later experiments prove this to be true, they reasoned, there would be no one cause of cancer. Instead, it might turn out that a constitutional defect related to electricity makes the body vulnerable to one or many agents. But like all the other theories about cancer, this one, too, is still to be proved.

*The blood test for cancer announced last month by Dr. Charles B. Huggins (TIME, April 25) indicates possibility of cancer somewhere in the body, does not point to the site.

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