Medicine: Sucklings' Cancer

"The most important basic medical discovery of the present generation"; — so one scientist called it. He referred to the theory that mice may get cancer from a virus in their mothers' milk.* This was reported in Science last week by Geneticist John Joseph Bittner, of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., where scientists have worked on this problem for more than seven years.

Dr. Bittner used two families of mice; in Family A, almost all the mice for many generations developed cancer of the breast; in Family B, cancer seldom occurred. Dr.

Bittner took a number of newborn mice from...

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