Word: cancer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Effective Drugs. Despite admitted drawbacks, chemotherapy has won a solid foothold. Dr. Charles Gordon Zubrod, 45, NCI's clinical director, responsible for all cancer patients treated in NIH's huge Clinical Center (TIME, July 20, 1953), . lists eight forms of the disease that can often be set back by drugs, sometimes for as long as two or three years. These are: acute leukemia in children, chronic lymphocytic and myeloid leukemia in adults, Hodgkin's disease, rhabdomyosarcoma (a rare muscle cancer), Wilms's tumor (in the kidney, present at birth), cancer of the adrenal glands, and choriocarcinoma...
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...
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...
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...
...youthful ardor of his adopted land, the U.S., and the indomitable spirit of his Jewish heritage, combined the tried music of the old masters with the experimental techniques of the moderns in a rich synthesis, discouraged cliques by living in isolation on the rocky coast of Oregon; of cancer; in Portland...