HOW BEANS HELP

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18368, 29 April 1925, Page 8

HOW BEANS HELP

IN CANCER RESEARCH, j EXPERIMENTS WITH RADIUM. Along tho wall of tho radium laboratory at Christchurch Hospital is an array of lanky bean plants, climbing innocently out of liquid-filled test tubes. They are not, although they might appear to be, part of a scheme for mural decoration, nor do they reprosont the beginning of a design to replace the kitchen-garden, should that site ultimately bo required for the Nurses' Home. Those eighteen test tubes with their sprouting or lifeless beans, may show the road to health to sufferers wasted by the scourge of cancer, for they are part of a long, almost an endless, series of experiments by which Dr. P. C. Fenwick and his assistant, Mr Charles Hines, are trying to And tho joints in the armour of the disease. By permission of the secretary of the Hospital Board, a representative of "The Press" paid a visit to tho oxperiinenters yesterday, and thoy graciously explained their work. The bean plants, it seemed, were made for the purpose of the experiments, to represent tho tumoura, the canoer growths in the human patients. _ "Wo use beans in place of human boings," Dr. Fenwick explained, absolutely without a twinkle.

All the beans are given "a clean start" on wet blotting paper and when they have germinated a single bean is fixed at the top of each test-tubo. Some of the test tubes contain waU>r and, technically known as "controls," they form a standard by which the others can be judged. Into other tubes arc put solutions of various drugs. Each bouu is treated to radium rays for a certain length of time, the radium grain oncased in a leaden box being placed over the seed. Some of the beans have made abnormal growth, others are stunted, while some have been killed altogether. "By treating the beans to different strengths of radium wo have been trying to find out three things," said Ur. Fenwick. "By observation wo found that a small ''irration' dose caused stimulation, and increased the growth of the plant, but on continuing the treatment, a time was reached when the beau was killed. Tho first object is to find when the period .of stimulation stops and tho killing begins. In order to cure cancer we must -use sufficient time to kill and not stimulate the cancer-cell, which is of the same construction as the bean cell.

"The series of experiments with solutions of different drugs is to find means of increasing the susceptibility of cells to the action of radium. Wo may find that the action of a particular drug helps to kill the plant under radium, more quiekly. If we prove that, then we might employ the drug on human beings in the hope that the cancer-cell would be made more susceptible to the radium. "We are also trying to determine any additional medicino to give patients at the same time that radium treatment is being administered, to better thv'r health, so that it may resist the poison set up by the cancer-growth in the tissues. The three objects are (1) The length of the radium treatment; (2) a means of making the growth more susceptible, and (3) a means of increasing the internal resistance." It will be months before the experimenters get what the Doctor called an "answer." "It is only the beginning of years of experiment in' cancer research," he concluded, "and the task is endless." Ho mentioned that experiments with radium on that strange living substance, yeast, were, also being carried out. And so it seems that the unpretentious broad bean may give a far more subtle service to mankind than ever tho "back to the greens" people dreamed of.