Cancer Volunteers

On wooden benches in the well-guarded recreation hall of the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus sat 53 convicts--killers in for life, bank robbers, embezzlers, check forgers. Some wore the white jacket and trousers of hospital attendants (duty for which they had volunteered in the prison); others, fresh from work gangs, wore blue dungarees. As a man's name was called he walked upstairs to a room equipped as an emergency surgery, sat down and proffered a bare forearm. Dr. Chester M. Southam of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute then proceeded to inject live cancer cells.

First, Dr. Southam used Novocain to anesthetize an area about three inches across. Into the middle of the area he stuck a tattoo needle that left a blue dot for a reference mark. Out of a vial and into a hypodermic syringe he drew up a cubic centimeter of pink fluid--mostly water, but containing millions of cancer cells from human victims of the disease. The cells had been grown for years in test tubes by Dr. Alice E. Moore, Sloan-Kettering tissue-culture specialist, who had carried the cells to Columbus herself --in her handbag.

Dr. Southam inserted the point of the needle alongside the tattoo mark and worked it up the arm for an inch and a half, just under the skin. A push on the plunger injected half the shot (three to five million cells) into the volunteer's arm. Dr. Southam pulled out the needle, turned it around and repeated the process lower down the arm. (Some volunteers received implants of tissue fragments of other human cancer strains, grown in animals and chick embryos.)

Three-Time Repeaters. The prisoners thus injected two weeks ago had been chosen from 150 who volunteered for the tests, which began last spring (TIME, June 4). The aim: to determine whether a healthy individual has an immunity against implanted cancer that will cause his system to reject it just as the healthy body rejects other transplants or grafts from a different individual. In advanced cancer victims this rejection mechanism seems to be greatly diminished or absent. Of the 53 subjects, 27 received implants for the first time, 15 were getting them for the second time, and eleven were three-shot veterans. This last group had received the same type of cancer cells (out of seven types cultivated by Dr. Moore) on the first two occasions, had already shown a high degree of immunity. Now, for their third pair of implants, they received cancer cells of a different type.

The blobs of fluid containing the cancer cells made little bumps on each man's arm. In a matter of hours or days, some of these swelled up and became tender and inflamed; the healthy body's natural defenses were at work and plain to see. In other cases the men felt no appreciable discomfort, and the swelling disappeared without any noticeable inflammatory stage; the body's defenses had worked just as effectively but less conspicuously.

Last week the volunteers returned to face the cancer researchers. Surgeon Arthur D.G. James of Ohio State University College of Medicine (cooperating with Sloan-Kettering in the study) injected Novocain, measured an inch and a half below the tattoo mark, and made a neat incision about an inch long across the arm. He folded back the skin above and below it, then cut out a little gobbet of flesh which embraced the site of the implant. All these biopsy specimens were flown to Manhattan for study. From some, it was found, all cancer cells had vanished within the week; in others, a few straggling survivors were detected. Dr. James removed only one of the two implants. The second was left for observation over a longer period.

"You Just Think." Although far from finished, the Ohio study has already furnished strong evidence of the power of the immune reaction in healthy subjects. (Researchers knew beforehand that similar injections into cancer victims would "take" and grow like their own disease.) To date, none of the prisoner-volunteers, the first healthy human beings ever to agree to such rigorous cancer experiments, have shown any sign of developing the disease. Implants not removed surgically have disappeared spontaneously in the maximum of a month's time.

Are the men worried? Frankly yes, said a Michigan-born volunteer, 28, while others nodded assent: "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. You lie there on your bunk, knowing you've got cancer in your arm, and you just think. Boy, what you think about!" Why do so many volunteer so willingly? Several prisoners have given their reasons in letters to Warden Ralph Alvis. Said one: "I took a life, and the only way I can atone for that, even in a small measure, is through something like cancer research." Another: "I am just starting on a life sentence, and it doesn't look like I'll ever be able to help anybody outside except by volunteering for something like this."

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