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Last week the volunteers returned to face the cancer researchers. Surgeon Arthur D.G. James of Ohio State University College of Medicine (cooperating with Sloan-Kettering in the study) injected Novocain, measured an inch and a half below the tattoo mark, and made a neat incision about an inch long across the arm. He folded back the skin above and below it, then cut out a little gobbet of flesh which embraced the site of the implant. All these biopsy specimens were flown to Manhattan for study. From some, it was found, all cancer cells had vanished within the week; in others, a few straggling survivors were detected. Dr. James removed only one of the two implants. The second was left for observation over a longer period.
"You Just Think." Although far from finished, the Ohio study has already furnished strong evidence of the power of the immune reaction in healthy subjects. (Researchers knew beforehand that similar injections into cancer victims would "take" and grow like their own disease.) To date, none of the prisoner-volunteers, the first healthy human beings ever to agree to such rigorous cancer experiments, have shown any sign of developing the disease. Implants not removed surgically have disappeared spontaneously in the maximum of a month's time.
Are the men worried? Frankly yes, said a Michigan-born volunteer, 28, while others nodded assent: "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. You lie there on your bunk, knowing you've got cancer in your arm, and you just think. Boy, what you think about!" Why do so many volunteer so willingly? Several prisoners have given their reasons in letters to Warden Ralph Alvis. Said one: "I took a life, and the only way I can atone for that, even in a small measure, is through something like cancer research." Another: "I am just starting on a life sentence, and it doesn't look like I'll ever be able to help anybody outside except by volunteering for something like this."