On wooden benches in the well-guarded recreation hall of the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus sat 53 convicts—killers in for life, bank robbers, embezzlers, check forgers. Some wore the white jacket and trousers of hospital attendants (duty for which they had volunteered in the prison); others, fresh from work gangs, wore blue dungarees. As a man's name was called he walked upstairs to a room equipped as an emergency surgery, sat down and proffered a bare forearm. Dr. Chester M. Southam of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute then proceeded to inject live cancer cells.
First, Dr. Southam used Novocain to anesthetize an area about three inches across. Into the middle of the area he stuck a tattoo needle that left a blue dot for a reference mark. Out of a vial and into a hypodermic syringe he drew up a cubic centimeter of pink fluid—mostly water, but containing millions of cancer cells from human victims of the disease. The cells had been grown for years in test tubes by Dr. Alice E. Moore, Sloan-Kettering tissue-culture specialist, who had carried the cells to Columbus herself —in her handbag.
Dr. Southam inserted the point of the needle alongside the tattoo mark and worked it up the arm for an inch and a half, just under the skin. A push on the plunger injected half the shot (three to five million cells) into the volunteer's arm. Dr. Southam pulled out the needle, turned it around and repeated the process lower down the arm. (Some volunteers received implants of tissue fragments of other human cancer strains, grown in animals and chick embryos.)
Three-Time Repeaters. The prisoners thus injected two weeks ago had been chosen from 150 who volunteered for the tests, which began last spring (TIME, June 4). The aim: to determine whether a healthy individual has an immunity against implanted cancer that will cause his system to reject it just as the healthy body rejects other transplants or grafts from a different individual. In advanced cancer victims this rejection mechanism seems to be greatly diminished or absent. Of the 53 subjects, 27 received implants for the first time, 15 were getting them for the second time, and eleven were three-shot veterans. This last group had received the same type of cancer cells (out of seven types cultivated by Dr. Moore) on the first two occasions, had already shown a high degree of immunity. Now, for their third pair of implants, they received cancer cells of a different type.
The blobs of fluid containing the cancer cells made little bumps on each man's arm. In a matter of hours or days, some of these swelled up and became tender and inflamed; the healthy body's natural defenses were at work and plain to see. In other cases the men felt no appreciable discomfort, and the swelling disappeared without any noticeable inflammatory stage; the body's defenses had worked just as effectively but less conspicuously.