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Sometimes, for reasons which medicine does not yet understand, a cell turns out to be different from normal cells. Most such "mutations," less competent than the normal cells, die and are absorbed by the body. But occasionally a variant cell appears that is disastrously competent.
Something in its chemistry allows it to defy the hormones that regulate the growth of ordinary cells. It multiplies wildly, growing into a useless mass of disorderly tissue. The tumor pushes among the normal cells, presses on nerves, thrusts organs aside or invades them. Often the gangster cells get into the blood and spread around the body like seeds carried by the wind. Where they lodge they grow into "metastases"—secondary tumors as lawless as the first one.
That is cancer: war between the body and its rebel cells. But it is not a two, sided civil war, because the body has almost no defenses. The body creates no antibodies against cancer as it does against diphtheria or typhoid. It builds no tissue walls to confine the destructive cells. It feeds them well, allows them to grow unchecked, and dies helplessly when they disrupt some vital function.
"The Nazis were rather like cancer," says Rhoads, growing philosophical as all scientists are apt to do when they think about cancer. "Starting with a variant cell, Hitler, the Nazis multiplied throughout the German nation, bringing it to destruction. It took external forces to kill the Nazi cancer."
Knife & Radiation. "External forces" are the business of Sloan-Kettering Institute and all the other centers of cancer research, which are spending something like $50 million in the U.S. annually. At present the only known cure for cancer is destruction: the surgeon's knife or radiation (X rays and radium). Such methods work well with some forms of cancer. Skin cancer, for instance, can nearly always be removed so completely that it does not recur. Other accessible cancers can be dealt with too, and surgical methods are improving constantly. A recent advance saves many patients who have a vital artery that has been attacked. An "artery bank" supplied from such sources as amputation cases makes it possible for the surgeon to replace a cancerous artery almost as if he were a plumber replacing a rusted pipe.
Not long ago, Memorial's doctors noticed that cancer patients, often reacted well after a serious operation, but died a few days later for no apparent reason. Sloan-Kettering's research men went to work to find an explanation, found that in such cases the patients had died because of a deficiency of potassium in the blood. When potassium was added in new cases, the patients picked up quickly and survived the operation. Dr. Rhoads believes that such improved surgery and treatment, combined with sufficiently early diagnosis, may save from cancer one-third to one-half of the people who now die of it. That would mean saving the lives of 6,000,000 to 9,000,000 Americans now living who are destined, on the basis of present statistics, to die of cancer.