Cancer & Glands

A slender, shortish man with crew-cut grey hair stood up in Houston last week to tell about his work in an improbable and seemingly unpromising field: castration. When Charles Brenton Huggins, 51, had finished, officials and guests of the M.D. Anderson Hospital for Cancer Research applauded him lustily. For though he had belittled his success and attributed much of it to luck, Dr. Huggins had communicated the enthusiasm and restless energy with which he fights on one of the many fronts against cancer.

Canadian-born Dr. Huggins settled in Chicago soon after he got out of Harvard Medical School and began seeking ways to relieve the human misery that cancer causes. Unlike many of his colleagues, who can do pure research with an eye to the far future, Dr. Huggins has never been able to sound dispassionate. His belief in the frontal attack--what he calls "cancer, research with one eye on the cancer of man" --has led him into more than one chase after rainbows, such as a universal blood test for cancer. But it has also led him, after a trying period of roundabout research into the function of the prostate gland in dogs, to castration.

Female Hormones. Cancer of the prostate in man, Dr. Huggins found, depends to a great extent for its growth on the presence of male hormones in the system.

Remove the source of the hormones, and 95% of prostate cancers shrink (though 75% later become active again). "Of course we never use the word castration," he says. "It has bad psychological connotations. It's like a doctor who is about to take out your appendix saying, 'I'm going to butcher you up.' " Sometimes Surgeon Huggins does remove the testicles, but often their hormones can be neutralized, without operation, by a female hormone.

Breast cancer (which occurs in men as well as women) is often of a type which shows the converse: it is dependent on female hormones, and can be controlled when they are eliminated. This may be done for women by removing the ovaries or giving male hormones, in men by hormones alone.

Good Recoveries. Along his research way, Dr. Huggins was depressed by the fact that the adrenal glands also produce male and female hormones, and their output could cancel the benefits of castration. Five years ago no patient could have survived for long without adrenal glands.

But now Dr. Huggins is enormously encouraged because cortisone has made it possible to remove both sex glands and adrenals.

"We did the first of these operations two years ago," he recalls, "on a woman who had a life expectancy then of six weeks and needed nurses around the clock.

She's driving a car now and shopping at the supermarket." Dr. Huggins glows with satisfaction over the successful cases--"I see a man brought in on a stretcher and I write out a prescription, and then see him come in again in a couple of weeks, hale and hearty; or a bedridden woman will get up and go to work. These are great changes.

It's really something to see." But Dr.

Huggins is still unashamedly upset over the high percentage of prostate cases which relapse and the large proportion of breast cancers which do not yield at all.

"The problem," he says, "is unendurably sad." Dr. Huggins refuses to lower his sights: "What I'm interested in is widespread cancer, the kind that is too big to be removed by surgery or treated by radiation."

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