Anatomists & Biologists

Lined up in the fight against cancer last week were sunlight and a dye called phloxine. At Washington's Carnegie Institution young John F. Menke removed some cancer tissue from rats, put it in small glass vessels. There it lived and grew in a culture of the rats' blood. He added some phloxine, a dye closely related to mercurochrome. Nothing happened. Then he exposed the vessels to strong sunlight for five minutes. Activated by the light, the dye attacked the cancer cells, withered them in 30 to 180 minutes. But certain normal cells imbedded in the cancer tissue lived. Researcher Menke's heart leaped with hope, despite the gulf between destroying disease in a test tube and destroying it in a human body. Last week, reporting his discovery to the American Association of Anatomists in Philadelphia, he was careful to emphasize that he had found no cancer cure. "It merely provides," said he, "a new line of attack for further work on the cancer problem."

Even further removed from possible practical application were the researches which famed Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, co-discoverer of insulin, reported to the American Association for Cancer Research in Toronto last week. First, by proxy, he upset the theory that tissue grafts of Rous sarcoma, a transplantable animal tumor, continue to grow and spread in their new host. Instead, the transplanted tumor, he had found, disintegrates, starts a new tumor growing around it. Later Dr. Banting himself stood up to tell the cancermen a story of his four fruitless years of trying to make chickens immune to Rous sarcoma.

With such patient, remote researches grows the body of knowledge which another Koch or Pasteur may some day synthesize into a cancer cure. In the meantime, cried Mayo Clinic's Dr. William Carpenter MacCarty in Toronto last week, let the world beware of any prolonged stomach ache or internal discomfort, no matter how slight. Said he: "It's a great mistake for people to think that cancer in its earliest stages produces any of the signs of severe illness. People should be warned to have examinations of internal ailments when there is still a chance for recovery--if it is a cancer--by operation."

Swift and terrible as a sword-thrust is angina pectoris. Disease or degeneration may narrow the blood vessels which supply the heart, or a tiny clot dam one of them. Then, usually with exertion or emotion, excruciating pain stabs the heart, radiates through the chest, shoots down the left arm. With the pain comes a feeling of suffocation, an anguished sense of impending death. Sometimes Death comes with the first attack; sometimes, as it did to Banker Otto H. Kahn last week (see p. 63), after many.

In Manhattan, day Banker Kahn died, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology heard Boston's Drs. Herrmann Ludwig Blumgart and David Daniel Berlin tell how they had effected ''striking relief" from angina. A thyroid gland secretion regulates the rate at which the body converts food and oxygen into energy (metabolism). Drs. Blumgart and Berlin cut the thyroid gland from 20 angina patients, thus slowing down the rate of metabolism. Functioning normally at a lower level, the heart was not balked when called on for extra work. Not one of the 20 patients has since been wracked by angina.

Mayo Clinic's Dr. E. C. Kendall was interested in another gland, the adrenal. When a derangement cuts off its flow of hormone, its possessor turns yellow, grows weak, wastes away. Called Addison's disease, this rare ailment was ordinarily fatal until physicians learned to supply the needed hormone from animal sources. But obtainable hormone is scarcer than the disease, and many a victim has died for lack of it. Last week Dr. Kendall reported that Mayo Clinic has isolated the hormone in pure crystalline form, analyzed its chemical composition. With this knowledge chemists may be able to manufacture enough of the substance for every sufferer.

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