Word: miceli
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Looking back at TIME's extensive coverage of cancer helped me put this hope and frustration into perspective. In 1949 we did a cover on cancer fighter Cornelius Rhoads, whose Sloan-Kettering Institute had tested 1,500 chemicals on mice in hopes of finding "chemotherapy" treatments. In a cover 10 years later, we predicted that "drug treatment will emerge as the equivalent of surgery and radiation," and quoted the National Cancer Institute's John Heller as saying, "I'm confident that we will have some success in the next few years...
...talk of safety and efficacy and extended double-blind trials are just so much noise. A treatment that may be available five years from now or next year or even in a few months amounts to no treatment at all. So what if angiostatin and endostatin work only in mice? If there's even a minuscule chance the compounds will cure cancer in humans too, why should the dying have to wait another minute...
When Dr. Judah Folkman is asked whether he can cure cancer, he invariably replies, "Yes, in mice." That's not entirely self-effacing whimsy. Like every good researcher--and every responsible science journalist--he knows all too well that most drugs that work in lab animals turn out to be duds in humans. The field is littered with "magic bullets" that failed, among them monoclonal antibodies, tumor necrosis factor, interferon and interleukin-2. While all were initially hyped as potential cure-alls, they have turned out to have only modest usefulness in the war on cancer. At best, says...
...they give us a relatively quick, inexpensive way of getting at the causes of disease and possible therapies," says Dr. Kenneth Paigen, director of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, the world's most famous mouse-breeding facility. Each year the lab ships out some 2 million mice from more than 1,700 stocks, including so-called designer mice with genes added or deleted so that they more closely "model" human disease. Among its customers is Folkman, whose lab relies on Jackson's best-selling C57BL/6J, or "Black 6" (cost: $8.15 to $10.85 apiece, depending...
Trouble is, Black 6 and kin often do their jobs too well. "Mice distort or exaggerate what you see in humans," says tumor biologist Robert Kerbel of Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Science Centre. Mouse tumors, which are usually planted just under the skin, grow much more rapidly than deep-seated human tumors. Also, as Nobel laureate J. Michael Bishop observes, too much breeding isn't always a good thing. In his labs at the University of California, San Francisco, he is genetically altering mice to provide better models for studying leukemia and neuroblastoma, the most common tumor in children under...