Advancement of Science

Medical men who attended the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Atlantic City last week (see p. 48) found some tepid thrills. First there was the sight of high-spirited, mouse-breeding Professor Maud Slye of Chicago smiling wryly at high-spirited, mouse-breeding Dr. Clarence Cook Little of Bar Harbor. The smiling apparently ended 25 years of bickering over the inheritability of cancer (TIME, Nov. 16). To no one's surprise she popped up with her everlasting credo: "I breed out breast cancers. I don't think we should feel so hopeless about breeding out other types. Only romance stops us. It is the duty of scientists to ascertain and present facts. If the people prefer romance to taking advantage of these facts, there is nothing we can do about it."

Soothed Dr. Little, one of whose major jobs is to direct the American Society for the Control of Cancer: "We know so little about how cancer is inherited that there is no cause for fear and dread, and there is no basis for predictions concerning inheritance of cancer in any individual case."

The pair smiled for newsphotographers, Miss Slye insisting, "I won't sit any closer. I don't like him well enough." They then strolled down the boardwalk to pledge loud co-operation in cocktails. Roared Miss Slye, 57, wagging a finger: "Clarence Cook Little, you're a big handsome numskull." Roared Dr. Little, 48: "You're not a geneticist, Maude Slye." Cancer Detector-- Dr. Walter Schiller of the University of Vienna, offered a simple new way of determining whether or not a woman has cancer of the cervix.

He paints it with iodine. If the cervix is healthy, the iodine makes the surface turn blue. If there is the slightest trace of cancer, that spot will turn white. Dr. Schiller urged all adult women to have the iodine test every six months, at least once a year.

Virus a protein molecule. For lack of any better explanation doctors suppose that influenza, infantile paralysis and many another disease are caused by viruses, substances invisible to the most powerful microscopes. Because such viruses grow and pass diseases on from one creature to another, doctors suppose further that all viruses are living substances.

Last year Dr. Wendell Meredith Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute weakened this theory by crystallizing the virus which causes mosaic disease in tobacco and tomato plants. So far as scientists know, living matter never crystallizes. Thus Dr.

Stanley's work seemed to show that viruses might be as inanimate as the white of an egg (TIME, March 23). Last week Dr. Stanley, 32, established his thesis, destroyed the theory of living viruses, won the A.A.A.S.'s relatively big prize of $1,000.

Viruses are protein molecules, Dr.

Stanley showed. The biggest known, they weigh 17 million times as much as a hydrogen atom, nearly one million times as much as a molecule of water. Left by themselves they are inert. But in contact with living plant or animal material they multiply incessantly. Under some conditions the virus protein molecule changes its inner structure all by itself. It then causes a totally different disease.

This potentiality of the virus molecule may occur in other kinds of protein molecules and may provide the fundamental clue to the stupendous variety of nature.

It may also explain inheritance of germ cells through the genes, units supposed also to be giant molecules. "In any case," said Dr. Stanley last week, "it now appears possible to list protein molecules along with living organisms such as bacteria, fungi and protozoa as infectious, disease-producing agents."

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