GERMS ON FILMS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 79, 14 March 1936, Page 6

GERMS ON FILMS

Baffling Diseases Studied DEATH OF SCIENTIST For 20 years Dr Ronald George Canti, of Harley Street and The Gables, Wedderburn road, Hampstead, devoted his life to the study of the world’s most baffling diseases. Kecently came news that lie had died, aged 52, a victim of his own researches. f The “Canti method’’ of cinemamicrophotography, born of a homemade apparatus in the basement of his Hampstead home, is now standardised and practised in every country in the world. In the laboratory which Dr Canti built himself at Hampstead he design ed a cinema camera which would take microscopic pictures of the growth of living tissue at intervals of, say, 60 seconds and automatically wind on the film for the next exposure. For six years he worked on a film of the growth of cancer cells. His homemade apparatus was not always reliable, so he fitted an alarm bell which rang whenever it failed to act. For years he and Mrs Canti, his young fair-haired wife, took it in turns day and night to “answer the bell” by adjusting the camera. Dr Canti refused to make a penny from his inventions.

He was appointed lecturer in clinical pathology at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and honorary scientific secretary of the British Empire Cancer Research Campaign. In 1931 he contracted Malta fever while experimenting with cases of that disease. He was seriously ill for six months. Last Julv. when Dr Canti was engaged on films of the psittacosis germ “parrots’ disease”—he fell ill again, and another germ attacking his already weakened system caused his death. There is no doubt that Dr Canti had been overworking a great deal before his illness,” said Dr Malcolm Donaldson, a Harley Street friend and associate, to a “Daily Express” representative. “He was a scientific genius, without a thought of self.” Dr Canti leaves a widow and four children.