Millions for Cancer

At a vast luncheon of alumni who attended Yale's graduation exercises in New Haven last week, a father and son flushed with particular emotion when President Angell rose, characteristically tugged his ear and announced the creation of a Jane

Coffin Childs Memorial Fund to be "devoted primarily to medical research into the causes and origins of cancer. . . . [It is] the greatest gift yet made to Yale by friends who prefer anonymity. . . . [It] represents the greatest opportunity of its kind ever given any university."

Starling Winston Childs, Manhattan utilitarian whose wife, Jane Coffin Childs. died last October, soon left the alumni gathering. Son Starling W. Jr., who remained, eventually explained: "My mother died of cancer and my father has never forgotten it. He has always wanted to do something about it. He has established the fund together with another person, who prefers to remain anonymous, as his contribution to the fight against the disease. The fund is created primarily to inquire into the causes of cancer rather than into its cure."

Advisers of the Childs Fund are to be: Yale's Medicine Dean Stanhope Bayne-Jones, a bacteriologist and Rockefeller Foundation protege; his predecessor as dean, Pathologist Milton Charles Winternitz, who at the American Medical convention announced new discoveries about the hardening of arteries; Rudolph John Anderson, biochemist; Dr. Ross Granville Harrison, biologist who began the artificial cultivation of living tissues, for which the Rockefeller Institute's Alexis Carrel is more famed; Rockefeller Institute's Francis Peyton Rous. whose discovery of a type of cancer (Rous's sarcoma) which can be transplanted from one chicken to another gave students of cancer a powerful new instrument of research.

The Childs donation to Yale, whose disbursement these scientists will manage, was $10,000,000, precisely the amount which the world's No. 1 cancer authority, Manhattan's Dr. James Ewing, says is necessary to establish an effective cancer study institute.

For a decade Dr. Ewing has declared that with six $10,000,000 institutes, scientists could soon control cancer. Nearest approach to that, before last week's gift, was $2,000,000 which Steelmaker William Henry Donner of Philadelphia, transient father-in-law of Elliott Roosevelt, gave for an International Cancer Research Foundation (TIME, June 20, 1932). Before that the biggest cancer war chest was the $1,400,000 of the George Crocker Institute for Cancer Research, which Dr. Francis Carter Wood manages at Columbia University.

Dr. Ewing's own institution, Manhattan's Memorial Hospital, had only $1,000,000. Last spring John D. Rockefeller Jr. increased that with land and $3,000,000 for a new building close to Cornell Medical School, where Dr. Ewing & staff teach, and close to the Rockefeller Institute and its cancer investigators, notably Drs. Peyton Rous and James Bumgardner Murphy.

This spring, Senator Homer Truett Bone of Washington and Representative Maury Maverick of Texas raised Dr. Ewing's hopes by proposing a National Cancer Centre in Washington, under Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr. Congressional committee hearings on this begin next week. With $2,400,000 to start, and $1,000,000 yearly thereafter, this Federal Cancer Centre would finance research, pay doctors $10 a day to study in Washington, loan radium, and give a $1,000 prize each year "to that citizen of the U. S. who shall be considered to have performed the most valuable research work relating to the cause, prevention, diagnosis or treatment of cancer."

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