Word: gressers
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...scientist was an American, Harvard-trained Ion Gresser, at the Institut de Recherches Scientifiques sur le Cancer in Villejuif, France. He made his own interferon by injecting viruses into the brains of laboratory mice; that stimulated the production of IF. After mashing the brains and processing them, he was left with a crude but potent solution of interferon. He gave the IF to a group of mice injected with a virus that causes leukemia, a blood cancer. After a month, the interferon-treated mice were in good health; those in an untreated control group had leukemia. Gresser then went...
...News of Gresser's work inspired Hans Strander, a cancer doctor at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, who had gone to Helsinki to work with Cantell in the '60s and had done his doctoral dissertation on IF production. In 1972, using IF from Cantell's lab, Strander began injecting it into children with osteogenic sarcoma, a rare and deadly form of bone cancer. Conventional treatment of this disease is to amputate the affected limb, in the hope that the cancer has not yet metastasized. In most cases, that hope is futile. Without additional treatment, the cancer spreads rapidly to body organs...
...Gresser's sculptures approach the human condition from the individual's viewpoint. They stand alone and often truncated in the room. Unlike Lichtblau's romantic vision of a social universe, his works appear to offer little hope for human salvation. One, "The Lovers," sitting inside the fire-place, presents two persons writhing on opposite sides of a wall, unable to touch one another. Gresser's sculptures cannot even give the consolation of a family group...
...Gresser chisels directly into wood and stone "the struggle and the supreme dignity of life." His work is pain-staking, the quiet evolution of the sculpture reveals a complex set of emotions. One piece, a woman entitled "Madonna Reborn," remained unfinished for a decade. "I stopped work on it and could not resume until I regained my feeling for the feminine form," says Gresser...
...figures evoke a probing sense of human loneliness. Even in the heavy granite in which Gresser often works, the sculptures are delicately crafted with a stern Gothic sensitivity for the grandeur of the solitary human form. Although his figures often appear blunt in their aloof individuality, the directness is modified by the lack of harsh edges. His surfaces are pleasing and receptive, especially the highly polished appearance of "Torso," whose edges are softened and very smooth. The softness is the redeeming quality in which we see a cautious hint of hope for human existence...