The Extent of Immunity

Good health carries with it some kind of immunity to cancer; even when cancer cells are injected or implanted under the skin of a healthy person, they die off and cause no disease. Cancer patients lack this immunity, and cancer cells from another victim will grow for a while in their bodies. Researchers at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute discovered these two basic facts years ago by injecting cancer cells into themselves, into prisoner-volunteers at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, and into cooperating patients with advanced cancer, at Manhattan's Memorial Hospital. But a nagging question remained: Is this lack of immunity peculiar to the cancer patient; is it a result of his particular disease, or does a similar problem afflict debilitated patients suffering from unrelated diseases?

Last week the Sloan-Kettering researchers, headed by Dr. Chester M. Southam, announced the answer. With the cooperation of Dr. Emanuel E. Mandel at Brooklyn's Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, cancer cells were injected under the skin of 19 patients severely ill from non-cancer diseases. The cancer cells did not "take" in any of these non-cancer patients (though four have since died, and one of them had an unrelated, hitherto undetected cancer of the bladder). Immunity to cancer is evidently a universal phenomenon, and it is lost only in the special circumstances, still not understood, in which cancer develops.

But clear and hopeful as the report was, it was shadowed by a storm in which a member of the Brooklyn hospital's board of trustees charged that the Brooklyn patients had been used "as guinea pigs ... in secret experiments . . . without their consent," that they had not been told what they were being injected with, and that their own doctors had not been told. Dr. Mandel conceded the patients had not been told that the injections were to be of cancer cells, but he insisted they had known they were being tested for immunity against cancer, and had given verbal consent. Hospital Director Solomon Siegel added that the patients knew they were being injected with cells. "The fact that the cells were cancerous," he declared "is immaterial."

Before the experiment started, Sloan-Kettering doctors satisfied themselves there was no danger that any of the subjects would contract cancer. What the doctors wanted to measure was the rate of cancer-cell rejection. But the fact that patients were not told the exact nature of the injections made the resulting outcry understandable.

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