Liver & Cancer

Doctors do not know the cause of cancer, but scientists have produced tumors by rubbing mice with certain coal-tar substances and synthetic chemicals. The great research problem now is to grow tumors in mice with extracts from human cancer victims. Six weeks ago Dr. John Frederick Menke of Stanford University Hospital announced that he had injected mice with fat-soluble essences from human breast cancers. For the first time in cancer history, he claimed, two of the mice had grown tumors. But his experiments have not yet been confirmed.

Meantime, Dr. Paul Eby Steiner of the University of Chicago was working on a different track. Since human bile salts are close chemical relatives of the cancer-producing synthetics, he concentrated on the liver. Last week in Science he announced: "An extract has been prepared from the livers of persons who died of cancer, which on ... injection into mice produced sarcomas (cancers) at the site of injection."*

Dr. Steiner procured over 20 pounds of livers from persons who had died from cancer of the stomach, lung, esophagus, pancreas, rectum. All the livers were perfectly normal. He ground them, extracted the fat, dried the residue to "a flaky brown material with a disagreeable odor."

In June 1939, he injected a solution of the powder into 56 mice. Results to date: 1) 36 mice have died of various diseases; 2) seven are still alive and healthy; 3) "13 tumors have appeared."

To check this experiment, Dr. Steiner made a like preparation from the livers of persons who had died from a variety of diseases other than cancer, injected the extract into 63 mice. No tumors appeared.

Dr. Steiner cautiously refrained from theorizing last week. He does not know what the cancer-producing substance is.

*Dr. L. M. Schabad of France performed similar experiments in 1937.

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