Word: method
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Another method is tissue culture. Bits of cancer tissue are stuck to the side of a test tube. A nutrient solution (made of such unlikely ingredients as extract of human placentas) is added. The tube is sealed and put on a vertical merry-go-round in an incubator. As the merry-go-round revolves slowly, the solution washes over the cancer tissue, which grows vigorously just as if it were in a living body. Drugs can be tested against it simply by adding them to the solution...
More important, Dr. Rawson believes, is the proof this method gives that cancer cells are not "autonomous"; that in some cases, at least, they can be trained to resume some of the functions of the normal cells from which they are descended. If they can be trained, perhaps they can eventually be trained to destroy themselves...
...head of the Division of Clinical Investigation, explains that, after all, human patients are the best source of information about human cancer. Clinical investigation is a two-way street. Observation of patients, especially their reaction to treatment, gives clues for researchers to follow. When the laboratories develop some new method applicable to human beings, the hospital is the only conclusive place...
Trained Metastases. Dr. Marinelli and his associates worked out a neat method of dealing with this difficulty. First they removed the patient's normal thyroid and with it the original cancer. This left the metastases which, they found, often consisted of cancer cells that retained faint remnants of the normal function of the thyroid. With the normal thyroid gone, the degenerate cells awoke and began to act like thyroids. Stimulated by the proper drugs, they began taking up iodine and making it into thyroid hormones. Then Dr. Marinelli gave radioactive iodine to the patient. The tumors, acting as pinchhitting...
Some cancer doctors admit that they have almost cracked up thinking about such things, and about their utter helplessness in hundreds of cases. Dr. Rhoads, too, has his moments of depression. He is sure that his method of concerted frontal attack, submerging niceties of scientific temperament, is correct. But he also knows that neither he nor his men nor anyone else in the world has yet found a cancer cure...