Word: cancer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most important basic medical discovery of the present generation"; - so one scientist called it. He referred to the theory that mice may get cancer from a virus in their mothers' milk.* This was reported in Science last week by Geneticist John Joseph Bittner, of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., where scientists have worked on this problem for more than seven years...
...Bittner used two families of mice; in Family A, almost all the mice for many generations developed cancer of the breast; in Family B, cancer seldom occurred...
Bittner took a number of newborn mice from Family A away from their cancerous mothers, set them to suckle immune mothers in Family B; then he set babies from the immune family to the breasts of females in the cancerous family. (None of these "wet nurses" had yet developed tumors.) Result: the young mice switched their cancer tendencies. Those who came from healthy stock developed cancer; those who were ordinarily doomed to cancer remained healthy. Their offspring were also healthy...
...they offered new evidence for the belief that in many cases the erratic process of cancer may be started by a virus...
...into at painless length. Such posthypnotic anesthesia can be localized at will, lasts perhaps two hours, can be renewed. Warns Salter: "One must be careful not to misuse his autohypnotic ability to mask physical ailments which need a physician's care." But he recommends the technique for incurable cancer agonies...