Medicine: Era of New Hope?

The guinea pig was a volunteer—Fred Learned, onetime farm editor, now an employe of the American Cancer Society. Two days before the big banquet at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria he had taken a dose of radioactive iodine; now handsome, scholarly Dr. Robley D. Evans, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would demonstrate how the substance, a product of atomic research, could combat cancer of the thyroid.

While Fred Learned restrained a Yankee grin and 1,000 guests hunched forward expectantly, Dr. Evans "vacuumed" him with a Geiger counter similar to the ones which will be used at the Bikini atom bomb test. When placed near his...