Gain?

The men who wage war against cancer know that an individual battle won is but a short step in a long, hard fight, and that every seeming victory may prove a wasted effort. Nevertheless, research scientists at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute last week proudly announced a victory that may mean great gains in a major sector: the search for a chemical cure for cancer.

Experimenting with animals, Sloan-Kettering researchers set out five years ago to find a chemical compound that would selectively attack types of cancer in the way that sulfa drugs attack streptococci or penicillin controls staphylococci.

The results: Without injury to healthy cells, new drug combinations have completely cured 59% of 2,866 rats and mice suffering from 46 different types of animal cancer.*--Some compounds were especially effective. For the first time in history, a drug (triethylene melamine) cured 100% of the rats with one type of animal cancer; used against another type of cancer, the same compound was 95% effective. Other compounds cured 98% of one type of mouse leukemia ("blood cancer"), a disease that has been restrained but never cured in humans.

A chemical weapon against cancer has always been looked upon as ideal--such weapons as X ray or radium therapy work with an undiscriminating shotgun effect on growing tissues, healthy as well as diseased. (These techniques do not work when the disease is advanced and widespread.) But many authorities have held that chemicals, too, would prove hazardous. Sloan-Kettering's preliminary findings with rats and mice suggest that the hazard may be overcome, but the crucial test is still to come--the testing of these and other compounds on transplanted human cancers in rats and mice (TIME, April 20, 1953). The results so far, said the institute's director, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, "justify the hope that further study may reveal compounds capable of achieving permanent cure in man."

-- *Last week Dr. George E. Wakerlin, a Chicago physiologist, reported in Today's Health that an estimated 25,000 cancers in humans (10% of the total) are cured each year in the U.S., using present techniques. Other estimates of cures have been more optimistic.

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