Word: cancers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...anti-cancer defenses break down is, in most cases, unknown. Many authorities accept the idea of some hereditary susceptibility. Sometimes there are easy, if superficial, explanations. The combination of a chemical carcinogen (cancer-causing factor) with physical irritation is plainly villainous. Cancer of the scrotum among London chimney sweeps was described by Percivall Pott in 1775. The disease disappeared when the sweeps were taught to wash themselves clean of the carcinogenic soot. Lung cancer from inhaling chromate-ore dusts and nickel-refining fumes can be prevented by the wearing of masks, coupled with adequate ventilation. Even the cancer-causing tobacco...
Villainous Combination. Many people get cancer, but most do not. Are there no mutated cells in the systems of those who escape? Almost certainly there are, says Dr. George Moore, director of New York's Roswell Park Memorial Institute* in Buffalo, biggest of the few cancer research units operated by states. Dr. Moore has studied abnormal cells, which might well be precancerous, in the blood of apparently healthy people of all ages. His thesis: every bird, beast and man produces some such cells at all times, but the body's defenses are usually strong enough to destroy them...
...Hottest Thing. "Right now," says National Cancer Institute's Heller, "the hottest thing in cancer is research on viruses as possible causes." The Rockefeller Institute's Dr. Peyton Rous showed as long ago as 1911 (his findings were unpopular at the time) that one cancer (sarcoma) in chickens is caused and can be transmitted by a virus. Over the years, viruses were found to cause other tumors in birds and lower animals. But the gap between them and man seemed unbridgeable. Then the University of Minnesota's Dr. John J. Bittner showed that breast cancer in certain...
Probably no man has done more to save lives threatened by cancer than Greek-born Dr. George N. Papanicolaou. 76, of Cornell University Medical College, who devised a test for cancer of the uterus and cervix by smearing mucous secretion on a glass slide and examining the stained cells under a microscope. The "Pap smear" is nc' done routinely in hundreds of U.S. laboratories, for an estimated total of 3.000,000 tests a year-most of them for healthy women wisely having regular examinations. Vast ingenuity has gone into extensions of the Pap test: aerosols to make a smoker...
Attempts to devise a blood test for cancer (other than "blood cancers" such as leukemia) have been unrewarding, though Sloan-Kettering now has high hopes based on high levels of a substance called cytolipin H in cancer victims' blood. But even if such a test was reliable, it would not tell the cancer's location. Physicians still rely mainly on traditional diagnostic methods: physical examination, visual inspection of accessible sites with such aids as the proctoscope and bronchoscope, Pap smears and X rays...