Word: cancered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...long ago, Memorial's doctors noticed that cancer patients, often reacted well after a serious operation, but died a few days later for no apparent reason. Sloan-Kettering's research men went to work to find an explanation, found that in such cases the patients had died because of a deficiency of potassium in the blood. When potassium was added in new cases, the patients picked up quickly and survived the operation. Dr. Rhoads believes that such improved surgery and treatment, combined with sufficiently early diagnosis, may save from cancer one-third to one-half of the people...
Differential Effect. Surgery cannot help the other 9,000,000. Many cancers involve vital organs that cannot be disturbed, or metastases which spread so quickly and widely throughout the body that the surgeon cannot find and remove them all. To deal with such cancers some agent is needed that has a strong "differential effect," i.e., that kills cancer cells without hurting normal tissue. A few such drugs are already known, but they are only a start, and not good enough...
...trouble is that cancer cells are very like normal cells. An agent that hurts one generally hurts the other. Still, the gangster cells have differences. The very fact that they grow rapidly in a chemical medium, the blood, in which normal cells grow slowly, is sufficient proof that they are different. To find and exploit the differences is the chief goal of Sloan-Kettering Institute. The problem is being attacked at all levels-from simple testing of promising drugs to long-range exploration of the internal workings of cells...
Girls & Mice. This testing is a mass-production process which would be impossible on such a scale in a smaller laboratory. Girls in white uniforms sit at a table with cages of mice before them and bits of mouse cancer in glass trays...
Deftly a girl picks up a cancer fragment with a trocar (a tubular needle with a plunger inside). She grabs a faintly squeaking mouse, holds it by the scruff of its neck, efficiently jabs the trocar into the skin of its belly and up under a front leg. She plants the cancer by pushing it out with the plunger. Then she reaches for another mouse...