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> Advocates of euthanasia insist that a terminally ill person should be allowed to choose between prolonging his life and ending it. Pollster Mervin Field reports that a good many Californians, at least, appear to agree. In a recent Field poll of 504 Californians carefully selected to provide a good cross section of the state's population, 87% agreed that incurably ill patients should have the right to refuse medication that might prolong their lives. A significant number of those polled were willing to go even further. When asked if incurably ill patients should have the right to ask for and receive medication that would painlessly end their lives, 63% (including 41% of those over 70) said yes.

> Doctors are constantly searching for new ways of diagnosing cancers early, before the tumors spread so that effective treatment is difficult. Dr. Richard Sternheimer, 74, a pathologist at Chicago's Michael Reese Medical Center, has now developed a staining technique that screens cells in the urine. Because urine is formed by the kidneys and passes through the ureters, bladder, urethra and, in males, the prostate gland before it is excreted, it contains cells sloughed off from all of these organs. To determine if any of those cells are cancerous, Sternheimer stains them with two dyes: a blue coloring that attaches itself to the nucleus of diseased cells and a red coloring that combines with all cell components. The malignant cells are not only differentiated by color but by the rate at which they take up the dye; they become stained before healthy cells do. Sternheimer's test must still be tried on a large number of patients and evaluated before its effectiveness can be established. But it has already shown its potential for detecting cancers early. When a patient at Michael Reese for treatment of an eye ailment recently underwent a battery of lab tests, Sternheimer's test suggested that he had cancer of the bladder. Surgery confirmed the cancer, and it was removed before it had spread to other organs.

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