The future of cancer research

Abstract

To forecast development in the future is a thankless job--for who can tell? I was once asked to write a prophecy for placement in a corner stone as to the state of biological investigation fifty years in the future. I refused, saying that if I could know what it was to be in two years I would be satisfied. My only excuse is that I have now been at the job of cancer research for 52 years, interrupted it is true by a couple of wars and other interludes. Still, that time included a lot of experiences, particularly as three-fifths of it included directing others in cancer research. Looking back on this time I wonder how slow was the progress of thought and experiment. During this time, I followed many leads: Fibiger's work (1) in 1927 on experimental production of transplantable cancer; the colloidal aspects of the vital system; tissue culture or the growing of cells for which we transplanted a pupil of Fischer's from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin; enzyme studies in 1931 (2) for which we transplanted a complete enzyme laboratory from the old German University in Prague, headed by a pupil of Willstaetter, for few in the United States knew anything about enzymes and certainly none about enzymes in cancer. All this was without any real leads to the future of cancer research. I began to think that I was accumulating a lot of isolated uncorrelated facts about cancer and finding that the research was upon experiment-and-error basis and not on scientific method. As a mat ter of fact it still is on the experiment-and-error basis as may be seen from the late meeting of the Association for Cancer Research at Chicago with its hundreds of papers. Experiment-and-error type of work is all right if enough experiments are done but sometimes it takes awful lot of them and then may not hit the right one, whereas the scientific method is to go from step to step and eventually arrive at a solution. So I began to consider the process of cancer. It had to have something to grow on and to support it like a plant needs soil and fertilizer-a growth factor as expressed by Fildes (a) an essential metabolite which cannot be synthesized. And what was the growth factor in cancer : it would be the same as in all young growing cells because cancer cells are immature cells--glucose of course for the main source but