One of the many mysteries about muscles is the fact that they rarely develop cancer. So, by the arcane logic of scientific research, what appears to be a hopeful line of cancer research is being conducted by one of the world's greatest authorities on muscle. He is Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 69, the Hungarian-born Nobel prizewinner* who is head of the Institute for Muscle Research in Woods Hole, Mass.
Clue in the Neck. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi (pronounced St. Georgie) entered the cancer field almost by chance. After he fled Hungary's Communist control in 1947, he was able to resume at Woods Hole his long work on muscle. Concentrating on one of the commonest of muscular diseases, myasthenia gravis, he had a clue. Sometimes a victim of "MG" does better after his thymus gland is removed. Searching for the explanation, Szent-Gyorgyi, who has a Cambridge Ph.D. in biochemistry besides his M.D., spent years doing delicate chemical dissections of the thymus glands of calves, supplied by Chicago's Armour & Co. The trail ran out. Szent-Gyorgyi had found nothing of value to MG patients. But by scientific serendipity he had found something that he hopes will prove to be even better: two substances, apparently hormones. One of them promotes the growth of cancer in mice, so Szent-Gyorgyi named it "promine," while the other retards such growth, and is called "retine."
Armour regularly shipped barrels of calf thymuses ("neck sweetbreads") to Szent-Gyorgyi in Woods Hole. His rooms atop the Marine Biological Laboratory building on Main Street began to overflow with centrifuges used to extract submicroscopic quantities of promine and retine. More recently, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi and his colleagues, Dr. Andrew Hegyeli and Jane A. McLaughlin, have found a cheaper and more abundant source: human urine. So, at nearby Otis Air Force Base, six latrines have special urinals, which yield from 60 to 100 liters a day for Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi's research.
Mouse House. In a little frame build ing around the corner from his labs, one of his assistants pipes the urine into a heat exchanger to remove most of the water. Then other assistants subject the concentrate to a tedious series of steps, dissolving and redissolving, to get out the promine and retine. The two substances are maddeningly similar. To get them apart, the technicians rely on the fact that promine separates out more readily in an acid solution, and retine in one that is alkaline. What they have left after days of work is admittedly still impure. Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi hopes other scientists will find ways to improve it.