Half-Forgotten Poison

The first antibiotic ever isolated by Nobel Prizewinner Selman Waksman was actinomycin. And just as Dr. Waksman hoped, the drug made strong medicine. It killed many man-killing microbes; unfortunately, it acted like a mankiller as well. It turned out to be a cytotoxin, a cell poison with the strange selective trick of attacking some cells more than others. So virulent that one milligram could kill a large chicken, actinomycin seemed far too dangerous ever to try on humans. Last week in Rome, pleasantly surprised, Dr. Waksman told the International Congress of Microbiology that German scientists have finally taken the sting from his dangerous drug and turned it into a potential weapon against cancer.

Dr. Waksman himself tried hard to tame actinomycin, but none of his chemical tricks seemed to work. After thousands of animals had been killed in his Rutgers University lab, he gave up and began hunting other antibiotics. By 1943, he found the wonder drug, streptomycin. In 1949. he and his assistants produced neomycin (TIME, April 4, 1949). Actinomycin became a half-forgotten curiosity. Dr. Waksman kept only a sample somewhere in the litter on his desk.

Meanwhile, in West Germany's Bayer Institute for Experimental Pathology, other researchers read his reports on the drug's selective toxin. Directed by another Nobel Prizewinner, Professor Gerhard Domagk, the Germans took up where Waksman left off. Working with fungus cultures, they isolated actinomycin C, a new form of the original antibiotic.

Actinomycin C worked wonders against some malignant tumors in animals. Unlike its predecessor, it had no seriously poisonous side effects. Cautiously (beginning with minute doses that were slowly raised to 250 micrograms), it was given to patients suffering from cancer of the lymphatic system. In several cases, the cancers shrank in size.

On this scanty evidence, Dr. Waksman and his German colleagues allow themselves only cautious optimism. But Waksman is sure that scientists will now be going back to the 100 or more antibiotics that have been discarded as too toxic. Perhaps others will be found among them to attack specific types of cancer cells.

Delegates to the congress also reported progress in other fields:

P: After seven patient years of failure, Britain's Dr. Christopher H. Andrewes and his staff of common-cold experts reported that they had succeeded in growing cold virus outside the human body. Using human lung tissue, Andrewes & Co. cultivated the virus in incubators, proved it was still potent by infecting volunteers. Now the researchers see their way clear for close studies of the cold bug's growth and susceptibility to drugs. Their hope: an eventual cold-killing vaccine.

P: From the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn, Dr. Frederick Traub reported that high-energy radiation from experimental atom smashers can beat the life out of tough bacteria and viruses. Using this technique, doctors may be able to prevent such diseases as hepatitis from being spread by virus in transfusion plasma.

P: Careful always to distinguish between "Soviet microbiology" and the ordinary kind, Prague's Dr. K. Raska offered a solution to a medical puzzle: Why has the scarlet-fever bug dwindled in virulence during the past 50 years? The Soviet-style answer: "Deep social changes."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.