Word: founded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Almost daily, ways are found to give bigger radiation doses more safely to hard-to-reach parts of the body. Examples: cobalt-60 "bombs," a new cesium-137 unit at M. D. Anderson Hospital, higher-powered X-ray machines and linear-particle accelerators, ingeniously refined ways of implanting radioisotopes such as iridium 192 and yttrium 90 in tumors...
...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 and contracts for development and screening of new drugs. In addition, almost...
...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...
...tests now used are admittedly crude and unreliable. Not surprisingly, some chemicals that looked good in mice have failed in man, and a couple that missed in the mouse test show promise in man. But better screening methods are being sought, and some researchers believe that they have already found them...
...kidney, present at birth), cancer of the adrenal glands, and choriocarcinoma (mainly in women, and arising from placental material). The list includes four major types of cancer-leukemia, lymphoma. sarcoma and carcinoma. This offers some hope that drugs effective against all the many forms of cancer can be found...