Word: cancers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Knife & Rays. Treatment also is usually traditional: with surgery or X rays. For the most part, cancer specialists have to be content with five-or ten-year survival for their patients, and rate this as a substantial "cure...
...essentially new development in cancer treatment is chemotherapy's advance to the point where it gives relief from pain, and usually longer life, to 60% of patients with cancer of the lung, breast, ovary or prostate, as well as leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. From this has come a surge of confidence that increasingly potent drugs can be found that eventually will effect outright cures. So great is this confidence that the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center now gets the biggest single bite ($23 million) of NCI's budget, with $18 million going out in grants...
From Poison Gases. Chemotherapy, broadly defined, got its biggest boost in 1941, when Chicago's Dr. Charles B. Huggins reported that prostate-cancer victims did better and lived longer after castration. The important thing was not the surgery, but the chemistry-removal of the main source of male sex hormones. Similar but less marked benefits resulted from "chemical castration" by administration of a female hormone. In women, some recurrent breast cancers were retarded by female hormones and others by male hormones. But these treatments relied on natural body chemicals, not synthetic magic...
...transition came in World War. II with nitrogen mustard-synthesized for use as a poison gas. Cancer researchers began testing it. found that it killed cells in rough proportion to their rate of reproduction. Though it killed the cancer cells faster than the normal, it was still highly poisonous, could be given (by intravenous injection) only in small doses. And eventually the cancer cells became resistant to it. History has sadly repeated itself with scores of chemicals of this class (technically "alkylating agents") developed since. About 20 are credited with definite but limited usefulness...
More ingenious than simply poisoning the cancer cell was the idea that it might be fooled into accepting, instead of a normal food substance (metabolite), an analogue (close chemical kin) to fill the metabolite's place but yield no nourishment. First to use antimetabolites this way was Dr. Sidney Farber of Boston Children's Hospital and the Children's Cancer Research Foundation. Knowing that leukemic cells are avid for the vitamin folic acid, he began in 1947 to treat child victims of acute leukemia with analogues of folic acid. Lederle Laboratories sent Dr. Farber two, aminopterin...