Congress v. Cancer?

The wave of the long fight against cancer, which has been gaining impetus in the past few years, last week reached the U. S. Senate. Grave-faced members of the Commerce Committee and its subcommittee on cancer listened to stories of cancer ravages on the population (over 100,000 a year), possible cures, the need for a national clinic.

If the Harris resolution is passed, to authorize appropriation of funds to fight malignant disease, the Government's attitude toward nontransferable disease will be changed. In the past it has not been the usual Federal policy to finance fights against any other than "epidemic diseases."

Chief among the medical men summoned by California's Senator Hiram Johnson before the committee were Drs. Walter Bernard Coffey and John Davis Humber, cancer researchers at the Southern Pacific General Hospital, San Francisco. White-haired, horn-spectacled Dr. Coffey related his and his colleague's joint research, explained that their widely heralded "cancer cure" was "not a cure but an encouraging experiment." Dr. Coffey said that 1,506 cases, more than 1,300 them inoperable, had been treated with gratifying results. The Coffey-Humber extract, derived from the adrenal glands, which, when injected into a cancer sufferer, gives relief almost immediately (TIME, Feb. 24) was explained to the committee in simple English.

Supporting Dr. Coffey's testimony was that of Dr. Clarence Cook Little, managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, whose organization is attempting to focus attention on the danger of cancerous growths. Other cancer workers who supplied the committee with information: Drs. Joseph Colt Bloodgood of Johns Hopkins University. James Ewing of Cornell University, Hugh S. Cumming, Surgeon General.

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