$4 Million for Cancer

Cancer now strikes one U.S. citizen in nine. "Very rapid" progress against this mysterious scourge could be made if the problem got the same amount of money, brains and planning that was devoted to developing the atomic bomb. Atomic research may help solve the cancer problem; artificially radioactive substances have already been used as radium substitutes in treating the disease.

On this note last week, General Motors' Board Chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and Research Chief Charles F. ("Boss") Kettering announced a $4.000.000 gift by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish a Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. It was the largest single private donation ever made for cancer study. It will help make Manhattan's Memorial Hospital the largest cancer research center and cancer hospital in the world.

Half of the money will be spent on an Institute building ; the rest will provide an operating income of $200.000 a year for ten years. Donor Sloan hopes that others will contribute more money for running expenses -- an annual income of $500,000 would just about do the trick. (Meanwhile New York City will add a $1.500,000, 300-bed unit, the Dr. James Ewing Hospital, to the Memorial center. And Memorial itself is planning a campaign to raise $3,000,000 to $4,000,000 for equipment and other needs.)

Industrial Cooperation. Donor Sloan wants to find out whether research on the same "broad and comprehensive scale" as modern industrial research can crack the problem of cancer. That is why he put Dr. Kettering, boss of G.M. research for 25 years, in charge of the program.

With an income guaranteed for at least ten years, the Institute hopes to attract the best brains in the field. Memorial's present research staff will form the Institute's nucleus. Instead of hit-or-miss study like much cancer research in the past, the Institute will devote long-term concentration to the most promising clues -- which ones, no one is yet ready to say.

Through its unofficial link with G.M., and with expected cooperation from other industries, the Institute will have quick access to all industrial discoveries having a bearing on cancer. G.M., for example, has developed an excellent infrared spectroscope, a device cancer workers use in identifying chemicals. For the future it is a reasonable assumption that the chemical industry will perfect the extraction of new artificially radioactive substances (of hundreds of possible ones only about 30 have been tried).

Dr. Kettering is hopeful: "Mr. Sloan and I over the years have worked together on many apparently hopeless industrial problems which today seem so simple. . . . If we can turn up something new in this field . . . this will be ample reward."

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