Word: growed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Something in its chemistry allows it to defy the hormones that regulate the growth of ordinary cells. It multiplies wildly, growing into a useless mass of disorderly tissue. The tumor pushes among the normal cells, presses on nerves, thrusts organs aside or invades them. Often the gangster cells get into the blood and spread around the body like seeds carried by the wind. Where they lodge they grow into "metastases"-secondary tumors as lawless as the first...
...rebel cells. But it is not a two, sided civil war, because the body has almost no defenses. The body creates no antibodies against cancer as it does against diphtheria or typhoid. It builds no tissue walls to confine the destructive cells. It feeds them well, allows them to grow unchecked, and dies helplessly when they disrupt some vital function...
...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...
Williams has a reason for all this, of course. His field is merphogenesis--the development of different kinds of animals. If he can discover what makes pupas grow, he will know what makes humans grow...
...probably the only greenhouse where weeds and orchids grow side by side, and where people pay more attention to weeds. It's certainly one of the few greenhouses where plants wear bandages. Professor Kenneth V. Thimann put them on after injecting hormones into the stems to see how growth was affected. His investigation of plant galls may lead to new information on animal cancers...