At 8 a.m., a stocky, short-legged man with a brush of steel-grey hair rises from a big breakfast at his Georgian-style house, shoehorns himself into a midget Triumph estate wagon, and drives a couple of miles to the rolling campus of the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. Parking his small car in the No. 1 reserved spot, Dr. John Roderick Heller Jr. enters an unimpressive building labeled T-19.
Planned to house dogs used in research, the one-story structure is the temporary command post from which Dr. Heller leads the major part of the U.S. fight against one of mankind's oldest and deadliest enemies—cancer. T19 is headquarters of the National Cancer Institute, and John R. Heller, 54, is the National Cancer Institute's director.
Across Dr. Heller's desk, from his far-flung research fields, flow curious and varied intelligence items—students gathering puffball mushrooms, desert rats that have learned to smoke, a drug made from a chemical relative of DDT, a plastic "iron lung'' for mice. To him, they all fit tiny corners of the vast jigsaw that must be filled in before cancer can be conquered. Meanwhile, his reports on the enemy's inroads are grim:
¶ Cancer will strike 450,000 Americans this year and kill 260,000, making it the biggest killer after diseases of the heart and arteries.
¶ Lung cancer is increasing faster than any other form of cancer, has a lower cure rate than most, will kill 35,000 Americans this year (85% of them men).
¶ After increasing alarmingly for a quarter-century, the death rate from leukemia in the North is leveling off, but is still rising rapidly in the South.
Anti-cancer forces have scored some gains, Dr. Heller notes: one cancer victim out of three is now saved, meaning cured or enabled to survive five years or more. Until recently, it was only one in four (see chart). But this advance could be upped by 50% merely by early detection and prompt treatment. About 75,000 cancer deaths every year are needless sacrifices to ignorance, apathy and fear.
To make sure that all cancer victims who can be successfully treated get help, and to find ways of saving the half who are now doomed, NCI, a branch of the U.S. Public Health Service, is mounting history's most intensive campaign against a human illness. Its budget is skyrocketing: from $14 million when Dr. Heller took over in 1948 to $75 million in the fiscal year just ended, to a probable $100 million in the fiscal year just begun. It musters the efforts of 675 direct employees and thousands of independent researchers through grants and contracts. NCI's budget embraces almost 80% of all U.S. outlays for cancer research. Next biggest backer: the American Cancer Society, with $9,250,000 a year.
Nature of the Beast. Research must find answers to three complex questions: 1) What is cancer and what are its causes? 2) How can it best be detected, treated and cured? 3) How can it be prevented?
The experts are in close agreement on what cancer is. First, it is not one disease any more than "infection" is. Cancers ravage the entire plant and animal kingdoms. In man there are 200 to 300 kinds, though 90% of human cancers belong to 30 common types. So "cancer" is a collective term.