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The experts are almost unanimous, too, in believing that wherever cancer appears, its essential nature is the same: a growth of cells that have rebelled against the body's rigid chemical control. Normally, hormones and enzymes work together in a delicate harmony of checks and balances to regulate cell growth. Once the cancerous process begins, it tends to snowball. The abnormal cells consume more than their share of cell foods, can flourish in a victim who is starving, or actually cause him to starve. Like juvenile delinquents, they grab what they want, and never grow up to assume the duties of normal, mature cells. They tend to reproduce early and die young.
How do the first abnormal cells get that way? The experts cannot agree. Columbia University's Dr. Samuel Graff expresses the current consensus: all cancerous cells are the result of mutation, and mutations can be set off by many known factors—inherited defective genes, radiation by X or gamma rays, ultraviolet light, many chemicals, including some of the huge class of hydrocarbons, physical irritation of tissues, and certainly in some animal cancers by the invasion of a virus. There may be other, still unknown factors causing mutation.
Villainous Combination. Many people get cancer, but most do not. Are there no mutated cells in the systems of those who escape? Almost certainly there are, says Dr. George Moore, director of New York's Roswell Park Memorial Institute* in Buffalo, biggest of the few cancer research units operated by states. Dr. Moore has studied abnormal cells, which might well be precancerous, in the blood of apparently healthy people of all ages. His thesis: every bird, beast and man produces some such cells at all times, but the body's defenses are usually strong enough to destroy them. That healthy people have a specific immunity against anybody else's cancer has been shown in dramatic tests by investigators from Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute and Ohio State University on prisoner volunteers at Columbus' Ohio Penitentiary (TIME, Feb. 25, 1957)-Victims of advanced cancer have no immunity against their own or somebody else's cancer.
Why and how anti-cancer defenses break down is, in most cases, unknown. Many authorities accept the idea of some hereditary susceptibility. Sometimes there are easy, if superficial, explanations. The combination of a chemical carcinogen (cancer-causing factor) with physical irritation is plainly villainous. Cancer of the scrotum among London chimney sweeps was described by Percivall Pott in 1775. The disease disappeared when the sweeps were taught to wash themselves clean of the carcinogenic soot. Lung cancer from inhaling chromate-ore dusts and nickel-refining fumes can be prevented by the wearing of masks, coupled with adequate ventilation. Even the cancer-causing tobacco-tar fractions isolated by Sloan-Kettering's Ernest L. Wynder (TIME, April 27) seem most potent when their powers are reinforced by irritation or by another chemical—perhaps from automotive or industrial exhausts.