CANCER CELLS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18057, 6 April 1933, Page 4

CANCER CELLS

SHOWN ON THE SCREEN DUKE OF YORK SEES THEM KILLED LONDON, Feb. 22. A wonder film almost beyond the imagination of ordinary mankind was shown to a select and keen interested company at the home of the Prime Alinister, 10, Downing -Street, last night. This film demonstrated in the first, place how normal animal tissue cells grew and developed. In the next place it revealed how cancer cells also grew and developed. It was the British Empire Cancer Campaign that was responsible for last night’s demonstration, and the Duke of York, president, of the. campaign, was himself present. Dr. R. G. Canti, to whose unique camera installation the whole tiling was made possible, gave verbal explanations as the film progressed over the screen. AIAGNIFIED 40,000 TIMES What one saw last night was the progress of germs of life magnified 40,000 times, and quickened up so that Die human eye could delect the processes as iniicli, in several instances, as 1000 times, and once 3000 times.

A cinematograph of a pin-point sp°rk of animal tissue was first, shown. One

saw the living cells On it spread and expand, divide, subdivide; watched the absorption by the nuclei of these cells of lessor nuclei, watched in this pinpoint nation of life the 'pools of fatty matter surrounding the bubbling mass.

Then one saw the symmetrical, beautiful development of a single fertilised ovum of a rabbit, a thing of circles and curves and interlinking designs.

Dr. Canti explained that a cancer growth, like the other growths one had seen, was made up of cells. But whereas the normal cells of the human body cease increasing in numbers when -adult life is reached, those of a cancer continue unchecked unless controlled by medical or surgical means. RADIUAI TREATMENT Cells of rat cancer were shown. They went to work feeding on the nutrient provided, growing, dividing, increasing, very much as the normal animal cells had done.

“You will see what happens when radium is applied,” said Dr. Can.ti.

A moment later that vicious-looking culture was stiff in death. It moved no -more.

Asked whether one was to understand by the film that radium was a certain cure for cancer, Dr. Canti was not prepared to guarantee that. “By no means would I say that. Cancer is an unorganised growth, and it recurs very much more frequently than it disappears for good.”