Word: hellers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from a big breakfast at his Georgian-style house, shoehorns himself into a midget Triumph estate wagon, and drives a couple of miles to the rolling campus of the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. Parking his small car in the No. 1 reserved spot, Dr. John Roderick Heller Jr. enters an unimpressive building labeled...
Planned to house dogs used in research, the one-story structure is the temporary command post from which Dr. Heller leads the major part of the U.S. fight against one of mankind's oldest and deadliest enemies-cancer. T19 is headquarters of the National Cancer Institute, and John R. Heller, 54, is the National Cancer Institute's director...
Across Dr. Heller's desk, from his far-flung research fields, flow curious and varied intelligence items-students gathering puffball mushrooms, desert rats that have learned to smoke, a drug made from a chemical relative of DDT, a plastic "iron lung'' for mice. To him, they all fit tiny corners of the vast jigsaw that must be filled in before cancer can be conquered. Meanwhile, his reports on the enemy's inroads are grim...
...Heller's method was to set up a pulsed electromagnetic field (80-180 pulses per sec., 27 megacycles) between electrodes. When he put tiny bits of iron, carbon, silver, oil, fat, starch or mammalian cells on a glass slide between the electrodes, he found that any asymmetrical particle promptly turned so that its long axis lay along the lines of force. Groups lined up Indian-file, like iron scraps between magnetic poles. Microorganisms such as bacteria or protozoa were forced to travel in similar paths; they resumed swimming normally at random only when the power was turned...
Most important, Heller found that the chromosomes could be twisted, turned, forced into new alignments. Since chromosomes carry the genetic material that controls growth and heredity, this maltreatment often kept cells from dividing, or caused mutations. Dr. Heller's waves are so specific that a change of frequency or pulsing can limit their effect to a single kind of cell, leaving slightly different cells unaffected. Since cancer cells differ from normal cells, there is a chance (which Dr. Heller does not want to talk about) that they can be damaged by radio waves that do not hurt healthy tissue...