Volunteers for Cancer

Even for the hardened inmates of a stir once notorious for its toughness, there was a jolt in the Page One banner-line on the Ohio Penitentiary News: CANCER RESEARCH VOLUNTEERS NEEDED. Then Dr. Richard H. Brooks spelled out his call for 25 prisoners to receive injections of human cancer cells in both arms, and concluded: "Anyone interested in volunteering for research on our yet most baffling problem of our age is requested to send a 'kite' to Warden Alvis." Kite is prison slang for a note, and last week Warden Ralph W. Alvis got 120 of them from convict-volunteers.

Some 40 of them also volunteered a reason for signing up--most explained that members of their families had died or were suffering from cancer. "Four or five," added the warden, "simply said they had been stinkers all their lives and wanted to do something worthwhile."

The Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus, long noted as the place where O. Henry blossomed as a writer,*and the scene of a 1930 fire that killed 320 inmates, won favorable attention not long ago for the prisoners' willingness to volunteer for tularemia (rabbit fever) experiments and to donate skin for victims of severe burns.

In the cancer tests, they were assured, the risk of contracting cancer as a result of the injections is negligible. But to confirm some tentative findings and get more data, medical researchers must conduct experiments in which there may be some risk. Up to now, cancer cells have been transferred from one human being to another in three ways: by accident during an operation or experiment; by a researcher who deliberately injected himself; into a willing patient already near death from cancer. If the recipient has no cancer, the injected cells die; if he has the disease, the injected cells live and multiply.

Cooperating in the Ohio pen trials are Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute and Ohio State University's College of Medicine. Their researchers will inject cancer cells just under the skin (not into the bloodstream) of a volunteer's forearms. After two weeks, they will cut out one injection site (leaving a hairline wound about half an inch long). The second will be left and studied. It is expected that if there is any growth, it will be only at the injection site, and it will be cut out as soon as detected.

The researchers hope 1) to prove that it is impossible to give cancer to a cancer-free subject; 2) to learn, by studying tissues removed after varying lengths of time, why this is so--by what mechanism of resistance the healthy body destroys a cancer invader.

-Convicted in 1898 of embezzling funds from a bank in Austin, Texas, William Sydney Porter, then 35, was sentenced to five years in prison; good behavior reduced the term to three years and three months, most of which Porter served in the pharmacy. In that time, he developed the talent that produced the works of O. Henry.

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