Nucleus & Cancer

Researchers trying to find what causes a normal cell to become cancerous reported a significant step last week. A high-powered team of six investigators from the National Institutes of Health and Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute announced that they had taken a virus that causes cancer in laboratory animals and had extracted the nucleic acid from the submicroscopic particles (only 1/100,000 mm. in diameter). This nucleic acid, when injected into test-tube growths of normal mouse cells, made them behave abnormally, as in cancer. The resulting cells, injected into hamsters, caused cancer every time. More strikingly, so did an injection of the nucleic acid alone.

The virus was that of Stewart-Eddy polyoma, named for N.I.H.'s Drs. Sarah Stewart and Bernice Eddy (TIME, July 27). Team members stripped the protein overcoat from the virus particles to get the nuclear content. This proved to be a form of deoxyribonucleic acid, which has an enormously complex structure with a molecular weight of 2,000,000 or more.

In all self-propagating cells, some form of DNA is the template that determines what form the daughter cells will take after subdivision. For cancer research, the significance of the polyoma-DNA work is that it showed how foreign DNA, invading normal cells, can upset their reproduction so that cancerous offspring result.

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