Belated Recognition

Few men have so richly deserved a Nobel Prize in medicine as Virologist Francis Peyton Rous, 87, of Manhattan's Rockefeller University, and Surgeon Charles Brenton Huggins, 65, of the University of Chicago. But each man seemed to have lost his chance long ago. It is more than 50 years since Rous did his pioneering cancer research, more than 25 since Huggins made his impressive contributions to treatment of the same disease. But last week Stockholm's Royal Caroline Institute belatedly corrected both glaring omissions. It named Drs. Rous and Huggins to share the 1966 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, worth $60,000.

Breast of Chicken. Major reason for the delay in Rous's recognition was the very nature of his award-winning discoveries. In 1911 he reported that he had ground up and filtered material from a kind of cancer (sarcoma) on the breast of a Plymouth Rock hen.

The resulting extract, he said, caused identical cancers when it was injected into other hens. Since he was sure he had removed all cancer cells from the extract, Dr. Rous was thus convinced that what was left must be a filter able virus.

To the medical and scientific community of the day, this was utter nonsense. If true, it meant that cancer (at least in fowls) was an infectious disease, and everyone "knew" it was not. More likely, his critics scoffed, Rous had inadvertently let some cancer cells slip through his filters. With infinite patience and persistent good humor, Dr. Rous extended his work to other kinds of tumors in different species of fowl. A quarter-century later, the late Dr. Richard E. Shope followed his lead and produced virus-induced tumors in rabbits. By now, half a dozen mammalian species carry viral cancers in the laboratory.

This does not mean that cancer is infectious in the same way as influenza or measles--"To this day," says Dr. Rous, "I have found no case where a tumor has been transferred from one person to another." Nor does it necessarily even mean that any human cancer is caused by a virus, but the likelihood of this seems so great that around the world tens of millions of dollars are now being spent annually by scientists to see whether Rous's long-maligned discovery can lead the way to control of some cancers in man. Dr. Rous himself, though "retired for age" 21 years ago, still goes to his lab almost every day, directing a third generation of researchers in the pursuit of his ideas.

Surgery & Chemistry. Canadian-born Surgeon Huggins was not the first to observe that some cancers of the prostate shrivel when the patient's source of male hormones is removed, or that some breast cancers regress when the sources of female hormones are removed. But he was the first to apply this knowledge so aggressively as to prolong the lives of countless patients. As a surgeon, Huggins pioneered an operation for removal of the testes (castration) in the treatment of prostate cancer, and he had the vision to see that it was not the surgery but the resulting chemical (hormonal) change that produced the benefit. He is now able to treat many prostate patients without surgery, using female hormones instead. Similarly, some women with breast cancer are successfully treated with male hormones. Dr. Huggins has helped to make variants of the natural hormones, substances that have little or no feminizing effect on men or masculinizing effect on women.

In modest comment on his award, Dr. Rous said: "I work on the side of cancer research that has thus far yielded no practical results, whereas Dr. Huggins has saved innumerable lives." Dr. Huggins reciprocated by calling Dr. Rous "my hero in medicine."

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