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Obviously, the ultimate goal is prevention. Here cancer offers its usual paradoxes. There is no faintest clue as to how most of the commonest forms can be prevented; yet in those cases where trigger mechanisms have been spotted, preventive measures have been more effective than against any other disease. Scrotum cancer of U.S. oil workers, from a wax-pressing process, has been wiped out (as was chimney sweeps' cancer) by keeping the dangerous chemical at a distance. So has bladder cancer in the dye industry. Circumcision and scrupulous cleanliness markedly reduce a man's risk of cancer of the penis, and possibly his wife's risk of cervical cancer.
Biggest question in prevention today is how the rise in lung cancer—virtually confined to heavy-smoking men—can be checked and reversed. Rod Heller, bureaucrat and son of a tobacco-growing state (although he has never smoked), has weighed all the conflicting evidence and arrived at a forthright conclusion: "Statistical evidence, supported by laboratory findings, has shown that excessive cigarette smoking can be a cause of lung cancer, and that the greater the consumption of cigarettes, the greater the risk." Practical Dr. Heller sees little prospect of changing U.S. smoking habits, pins his hopes for lung-cancer prevention on con victing a specific substance in tobacco tars as the guilty agent, then getting rid of it.
Firsthand Experience. The field of cancer is so vast, so full of unexplainable contradictions, so stubborn in resisting a decisive, exploitable breakthrough, that the army of investigators deployed in it suffer more frustration than most men on medicine's frontiers. The emotional anguish inseparable from cancer heightens their tension. The result is more than average jealousy and backbiting among cancer fighters. As chief coordinator in this setting, Rod Heller is a near ideal choice. Says a leading independent cancer specialist: "He doesn't make people mad. He's a diplomat." Says Heller himself: "You could call me a reasonably relaxed person."
Born at what he calls a "wide place in the road" named Fair Play, S.C. (40 miles southwest of Greenville), Heller is the son and grandson of physicians, had a brother and an uncle with M.D.s. Yet when he entered Clemson College at 16, Rod went into engineering. He switched to the family tradition in time to get his M.D. from Atlanta's Emory University in 1929. Joining up with the U.S. Public Health Service in 1931, he began hopscotching around on two-year tours of anti-VD duty. In 1934 Dr. Heller married Susie May Ayres, daughter of a Tennessee banker. John Roderick III was born to the traveling Hellers in Harrisburg, Pa., second son Hanes in New Orleans, third son Winder (rhymes with finder) in Washington. At least one should keep the M.D. line going: Hanes, 19, is a pre-med student at Yale.