The Road Is Long In the Cancer Fight

Ocean County Observer

May 7, 1984

Cancer has become (at least until the advent of herpes) the scourge of civilization. Everybody is afraid of it, and so much money has been poured into cancer research that there is probably some truth to the old saw that more people are living off it than dying from it.

The history of cancer research in this country is unique. Until shortly after WW II the American Cancer Society did little but collect money to help victims of the disease. Then Alfred Lord, of Lord and Thomas (later to become a victim of cancer) went to the American Cancer Society and told them that he would guarantee several millions of dollars for their fund drive if they would get involved in cancer research.

The cancer society wasn’t all that enthused about the idea but the promise of money was beguiling and they accepted Lord’s offer. He then went to the radio stations to develop some publicity, but found to his dismay that the word “cancer” was not allowed to be mentioned on the air. Even the newspapers were loath to identify the disease and such euphemisms as “s/he died after a long illness” meant cancer, (and even today, “s/he died after a brief illness means heart attack) were commonplace.

Lord got radio luminaries such as Ed Wynn, and I believe Jack Benny to help tear down the barriers of censorship, and then through radio publicity, the American Cancer Society received donations well into the millions.

Shortly after WWII America, on an intellectual high after the successful development of the Atom Bomb, and perhaps somewhat guilty after having dropped it on two cities, started to become a patron to the sciences, as royalty was patron to the arts during the renaissance.

As a matter of fact no country ever poured so much money into research in medicine as did America between 1959 and the present.

What the money did was to develop a new breed of entrepreneur, the scientific capitalist, who with government funds was able to control huge establishments worth millions of dollars received as grants or contracts to do research for the federal government.

At this point Joseph Leiter decided to screen all the chemicals he could find against animal tumor models to see whether or not these substances might preferentially kill cancer cells. Thus started one of the most highly publicized and mightily subsidized misdirected enterprises ever undertaken. The pharmaceutical companies provided samples of all the chemicals on their shelves to submit to tests. Any results not pertaining to cancer but still biologically important, was routed back to the pharm companies and kept out of the public domain. Numerous small and not so small laboratories sprung up all over the placed to “test” these substances against biological cancer models.

Although chemotherapy really started with the observation tat mustard gas, used as a weapon in WWI depressed lymphocytes, the effort by Leiter to contracturally study every chemical extant was probably the commercial root of the chemotherapy boom.

Just prior to this the Feiser brothers at Harvard had synthesized methylcholanthrene, then the most powerful cancer inducing agent known. Harry Shay, a Philadelphia gastroenterologist wanted very much to produce cancer of the stomach. He went to the National Institute of Health and spoke with Harold Stewart, then chief of pathology of the cancer division. Stewart suggested the use of methylcholanthrene and Shay then introduced it directly into the stomach of rats. But no stomach cancer ever developed. Breast cancers were induced instead, as well as a small number of leukemias. The leukemias proved to be transferable from animal to animal, one generation to the next.. Then Lededrle Laboraties used the rat leukemias to screen triethylene melamine and subsequently thioTEPA for their anti cancer effect. The substances were temporarily effective.

Shay then was given the opportunity to test these substances in humans with terminal cancer, and thus began the modern age of chemotherapy.

However, despite enormous amounts of money thrown into chemotherapy, the most important advances in cancer treatment will evolve from basic research having nothing to do with chemotherapy.