Word: cancer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years ago, cancer was detected by the crude method of waiting for an obvious malignancy to appear. Then Dr. George Papanicolaou of Cornell University Medical College devised his revolutionary method of early detection: smearing body secretions on glass slides for microscopic study of cells. In thousands of doctors' offices, the now standard Papanicolaou technique is to stain cells with polychrome dyes. Seen in the visible spectrum of light, the dyes readily emphasize the structure of malignant cells...
...Washington's Walter Reed Army Hospital, by Captain Leroy H. Dart Jr. and Master Sergeant Thomas R. Turner, the new wrinkle rests on facts about the cell's nucleic acids that were unknown in 1943. Biochemists are now sure that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) generally increases in human cancer cells; they suspect that ribonucleic acid (RNA) also rises. If the nucleic acid can be spotted under a microscope, it should be a tipoff to cancer...
...field of normal cells. When the Army team tested 4,995 cervical and vaginal smears with acridine orange, they detected 171 "suspicious" cases compared to 156 in a retest by the Papanicolaou technique. When they later did biopsies on nine of the 15 Papanicolaou "negatives," they found cancer in seven cases. This does not necessarily mean that the new method is more accurate. But it can definitely speed up cancer screening. At Walter Reed, cell-smear staining with acridine orange now takes twelve minutes, against half an hour with the Papanicolaou technique...
...Dietrich Hoffmann at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, said Dr. Wynder, he has found in the tar no fewer than 17 hydrogen-carbon compounds of the polycyclic group (i.e., with several carbon rings in the molecule). Nine have been exonerated, but to the six already known to produce cancer on the backs of mice the Wynder-Hoffmann team has added two more-3.4-benzfluoranthene and 10.11-benzfluoranthene. But these chemicals occur only in minute quantities in cigarette...
These amounts, Dr. Wynder conceded, are not enough to explain the recent startling increase in lung cancer. So, he argued, either there are other cancer-causing substances still undetected, or there is something that may seem innocent by itself but increases the effect of these cancer-stimulating factors. Laboratory research is now aimed at reducing the tar's content of polycyclic hydrocarbons, either by achieving more complete combustion or by adding a catalyst to the tobacco...