RESEARCH ON CANCER

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 5

RESEARCH ON CANCER

RESULTS OF THREE DECADES

In hisf extremely interesting address at the official opening of the new laboratories of the Imperial- Cancer Research Fund, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins summarised not only the work of the fund itself, but the progress of knoAvledge in respect of cancer achieved since the fund's foundation in 1902, writes the medical correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph." Largely as the result of the pioneer work of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, it has now been shown that cancer is a disease affecting all races of mankind and the vertebrate animal kingdom as well. , The idea that it is hereditary and contagious is now no longer generally held;. and it is doubtful whether in view of the fact that the whole community is enjoying greater longevity— that far more people are living into the years in which cancer usually occurs —there is in fact an absolute increase in the incidence of cancer. From the very beginning the Imperial Cancer Research Fund confined itself principally to the laboratory study of cancer in animals, the nature of such tumours, and the characters of the cells of which they were composed. It was found that a malignant tumour could be transmitted from one animal to another and that it continued to grow, but did not affect the normal cells of the animal to which it was transferred, or cause them to become cancerous. LOCAL NATURE ESTABLISHED. Very largely as the result of the fund's Avork the local origin and nature of cancer has been established—a fact immensely important from the point of view of surgical treatment and removal. Since then, as Sir Frederick Hopkins reminded his audience, there have been perhaps two chief landmarks in cancer research. One was the discovery by Peyton Rous in 1911 that cell-free filtrates from a cancerous tumour in one domestic fowl could produce an exactly similar tumour in another. This was enormously strong presumptive evidence of the existence of some responsible agent, probably a virus. The second landmark was the discovery that certain chemical compounds of the carbon family could induce the appearance of cancer with remarkable certainty. More recently it has been shown that there is a strong chemical affinity between these cancer-producing substances and certain internal hormones, or internal secretions of the body, especially those associated with sex; and this has suggested that some excess or deficiency of these and their I balancing secretions may play an irnj portant part in jjredisPOsing to cancer.