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In World War II, Dr. Rhoads was chief of the Medical Division of the Army's Chemical Warfare Service. The gas program turned out to be "preventive" only; the enemy did not use gas. But the experience made a lasting impression on him. He came away from war work with enormous respect for what can be accomplished when scientists, who are notoriously in dividualistic, get together. Driven by wartime urgency, the scientists abandoned their jealousies and rivalries, submerged their temperaments and attacked each problem cooperatively from every possible angle. High-pressure wartime science achieved in a few years what would have taken decades of sauntering peacetime effort. Why not, thought Rhoads, use the wartime method on cancer?
What Dr. Rhoads thinks he is apt to say —loudly, clearly and often to a great many people. His persuasive tongue, a rare gift among scientists, had some effect. In 1945 Alfred P. Sloan Jr., chairman of the board of General Motors, gave $4,000,000 to set up the Sloan-Kettering Institute, with Rhoads at its head. Other sources of funds promised lavish support. The impressive building was finished 18 months ago, and Rhoads began assembling a staff. "All I can do," he says, "is pick good men, give them opportunities and help them keep pointed at the target."
Among cancer men, who carry on their research work individually and in teams across the country, brisk Dr. Rhoads is not universally popular. A few worry because they think his position gives him too much power over cancer research. Rhoads himself knows that he runs the risk of being called highhanded and arbitrary, the head of a vast research organization that stamps out individualities. But he hopes that Memorial Hospital, with its pathetic patients, will supply some of the qualities of a wartime emergency.
"Some authorities," says Rhoads,"think that we cannot solve the cancer problem until we have made a great, basic, unexpected discovery, perhaps in some apparently unrelated field. I disagree. I think we know enough to go ahead now and make a frontal attack with all our forces. Anyway, that's what we are doing. We'll follow every promising lead, and we know a lot of them. If the ivory tower men solve the problem ahead of us, we won't feel we've wasted our time."
Gangster Cells. The "cancer problem," as pathologists call it, is one of the strangest and subtlest that medicine has faced. Cancer is not an outside enemy that can be fought in the open like a foreign invader. It is civil war among the body's own cells, and it runs through all of nature like a red fiber of ruin spun into the thread of life. All vertebrates, including frogs and fish, get cancer. In all probability, the experts say, invertebrates and plants have cancer too.
As a normal thing, the several hundred trillion cells in a human body cooperate loyally, subordinating themselves to the body's higher life. Their functioning and their usually slow rate of multiplication are controlled, most scientists believe, by the chemical hormones which are poured into the blood by a set of regulating glands.