War on Cancer

A maxim of Hippocrates, in Old English lettering, hangs beside the desk of Dr. Roscoe Roy Spencer in Bethesda, Md.:

Life is short,

Art is long

The occasion instant

Experiment perilous

Decision difficult.

To a man who has made public health his life's work, experiments perilous are strictly a part of routine. In 1919 "Spenny" Spencer fought bubonic plague in New Orleans; in 1922 he went to Montana to tackle Rocky Mountain spotted fever, developed a vaccine which won him a gold medal from the American Medical Association, public renown as the hero of Lloyd Douglas' novel, Green Light. Now he is elbow-deep in another (and even more important) experiment: as director of the National Cancer Institute, he heads a staff of 120 seeking the cause--and eventually cure--of cancer.

Life & Death. Suggestive as it is of death (it is second only to heart troubles as top U.S. killer), cancer is in fact life run wild: a multiplication of cells, but in abnormal pattern. The riddle of the disease will not be solved until the secrets of the rebel cells which ravage human tissue are revealed. Meanwhile, the answer must be sought through research in the basic sciences of chemistry, biology and physics.

Over the past eight years, by exhaustive trial & error, the National Cancer Institute and its associates have identified a few pieces which may some day fit into a complete picture:

P: There is no single cause for cancer.

P: The disease has been produced by ultraviolet rays--indicating that cancer of the skin may be caused by overexposure to the sunlight.

P: The theory that susceptibility to cancer is inherited has been substantiated in experiments on mice.

In 5 1/2 years' experimentation with tissue cultures at the Institute, Dr. Wilton R. Earle transformed normal cells to cancerous cells by treatment with 20-methyl-cholanthrene, a coal-tar chemical. In an effort to determine what takes place in the mutant cells, he now plans to destroy existing cultures and re-outfit his laboratory for a fresh attack on the baffling problem.

As in the Atom? Last week in Washington hearings opened on the $100,000,000 Neely-Pepper bill, which would marshal "the best cancer brains in the world" for an all-out war on the disease, in the same way that the Manhattan Project conquered the atom. Surgeon General Thomas Parran of the U.S. Public Health .Service told a jampacked opening-day audience that there are not enough properly trained cancer researchers as yet even to begin such a program. Why not, he asked, use the existing facilities and experience of the National Cancer Institute as a nucleus for the research organization?

Not all medical and scientific experts agreed with him. Dr. Howard J. Curtis of Columbia University, one of the foremost researchers on the atom bomb, thought that an entirely new government agency should be created. And when Dr. Parran suggested that about ten years would be required to spend the $100,000,000, crusty Representative Matthew Mansfield ("Matt") Neely, co-author of the bill, exploded: "We have got to stop piddling around with cancer research. ... I don't care a cuss if the Public Health Service or Harvard College gets the money, if someone will just do what Roosevelt and Churchill did to solve the atomic bomb."

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