Some big news came out last week from the American Association for Cancer Research, meeting in Detroit's Hotel Fort Shelby. If the news proved to be as good as it looked, cancer fighters were in possession of something they have long been looking for: a blood test, almost as simple as the Wassermann, which could divide people into two groups—those who may have cancer, and those who don't.
The new test was devised by the association's president, Dr. Charles B. Huggins, 47, Canadian-born surgeon who developed the "Huggins operation" (castration) for advanced cancer of the prostate. Working with him at the University of Chicago were Physician Gerald M. Miller and Organic Chemist Elwood V. Jensen. With scientific hedging, Dr. Huggins called it "for all practical purposes a simple, cheap and reasonably sure test for cancer." He added that his report pulled together work done by others since 1932, and he hoped that it would not be treated as "sensational." If later work backs up the first tests, it cannot help being sensational.
During the last two years, Dr. Huggins and associates have tested the blood of 300 people, both sick and apparently well. They heated samples of the blood after adding a chemical called iodoacetate. In the blood of healthy people the protein (serum albumin) clotted much more readily than protein in the blood of people who had cancer, tuberculosis, various severe infections, such as kidney diseases. Where tests were positive, other diseases could be readily ruled out, and a search for the location of cancer could continue by more complicated methods. Study of the reasons why the blood protein of cancer victims is abnormal may eventually throw light on the causes of cancer. To Dr. Huggins, this phase of the work seemed more scientifically important than the test.
The experts, who have seen tests for cancer come & go, argued about the value of the Huggins test. Some said it had yet to be proved. Others said that even if it were proved, it would merely screen the sick from the well, and could not be called a diagnostic test for cancer.
Dr. Charles S. Cameron, medical and scientific director of the American Cancer Society, which supports Huggins' work ($74,485 last year, $89,600 this year), enthusiastically said that the test had "great value" and could be made in any clinical laboratory. Dr. Shields Warren, director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Biology and Medicine, and a former president of the association, called it "probably the greatest single advance ever made in the fight against cancer." Dr. Cameron promptly ordered 500 reprints of the Huggins report for distribution to clinics.
Other highlights reported from the continuing war against cancer: A virus may be one of the causes of cancer, researchers have long suspected. In 1936, a viruslike "milk factor" was discovered in mice. Last week a five-man Columbia University team reported that it had succeeded, after twelve years of work, in isolating, identifying and photographing (in an electron microscope) a virus that causes breast cancer in mice. The virus is so powerful that an injection of eight one-thousandths of a gamma (a gamma is one-thousandth of a milligram) produced cancer even in male mice. Next step, already started: trying to make mice immune to the virus.