CAUSES OF CANCER

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28475, 3 January 1958, Page 7

CAUSES OF CANCER

New Research In U.S. (NJZ. Press Association—Copyright) BOSTON, January 2. Treatment of cancerous growths had been improving and scientists believed the breakthrough against the dread disease might come this year, the Boston “Globe” reported. Normal body cells already were taking on many of the properties of malignant ones in test tubes in the Harvard Medical Laboratories of Dr. John F.- Enders, a Nobel Prize winner, and other scientists, according to the article. The consequences of this change of a cell too small to be seen with anything but an electron microscope “could have a greater impact on the world than the sputnik,’’ the newspaper said. Using human, monkey and other animal cells under the special conditions of growth developed for the polio virus in Dr. Enders’ laboratory, continuous lines of cells were being grown—much like yeast and bacteria in their multiplication. “But in many laboratories, including ours, the cells have been changing their properties,” the newspaper quoted Dr. Enders as saying. . “They grow very rapidly and come to resemble malignant cells Whether they have malignancy in the test tubes because we have taken away the normal factor that will not let them multiply or whether the change toward malignancy is due to a latent, unrecognised virus in the original cell is not yet understood,” the scientist was quoted as saying. Dr. Joseph Aub, a Massachusetts General Hospital researcher, agreed that basic research into the fundamental difference between tumour and normal cells—why one cell is cancerous and another is not—was most likely to provide the breakthrough in cancer.

“It could come this year, or next, or later,” said Dr. Aiib, who is president of the Massachusetts Division of the American Cancer Society. Measles viruses also grown in the test tube by Dr. Enders and his associates, the newspaper reported, had been sent to pharmaceutical houses since 1954 for development of “attenuated” or mild live virus vaccines. These vaccines, the article continued, were about ready for trial on groups of humans, in the same way, but in a smaller number, that the poliomyelitis vaccine was tested.