Immunity & Cancer

A growing chain of evidence indicates that a mysterious kind of immunity protects most people against cancer. Newly forged links in the chain, reported in Chicago last week by investigators at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute:

P: Ohio Penitentiary volunteers (TIME, Feb. 25) who had already sloughed off one injection of cancer cells threw off a second injection of the same kind of cells still more rapidly, reported Dr. Chester Southam. Evidently their original immunity had been increased by the first exposure. When they got a third injection of cells of a different type, they rejected it, but not so fast as the second, showing that the buildup of immunity was strongest against the type of cells first used.

P: Human cancer will grow in laboratory rats if they have been pretreated with cortisone or X rays. Dr. Helene W. Toolan left some rats untreated, planted human cancer tissue in them and a week later took blood and tissue specimens from the animals. Fresh pieces of cancer tissue were immersed in this material, then transplanted into pretreated rats. These implants failed to grow. The cancer had been neutralized by an immune mechanism in the blood of the first, untreated rats. P: Properdin, a chemical that occurs naturally in the blood, is one of the factors in immunity. Zymosan. a yeast product, raises the properdin level if given in small doses, but bigger doses make it fall sharply. Dr. William T. Bradner reported that after small shots of zymosan, 67% of transplanted cancers in mice disappeared, as against only 6% in untreated mice. But as the zymosan dose was increased, the cure rate plummeted.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.