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Cancer: disease of civilisation
Part 4: Cancer research has hampered progress
Given the fear with which a diagnosis of cancer is viewed, it is not surprising that a great deal of time and resources have been devoted to finding both the cause and a cure. But dogma of one sort or another has hampered progress in both areas.
When Louis Pasteur stated his germ theory of disease in 1862, it was greeted with derision. By 1874, when Joseph Lister acknowledged that his success with aseptic surgery was due to Pasteur's theory, all that changed. Now all diseases, including cancer, were thought to be caused by micro-organisms. This belief was strengthened later when 3 scientists, Moreau, Loeb, and Jensen, showed that cancer cells could be successfully grafted from one species to another.
In Cancer: Civilization and Degeneration, John Cope talks of the way in which the two discoveries above derailed the research on cancer.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century cancer was studied mainly as it existed in human beings in the consulting room, at the bedside, in the operating theatre and in the post-mortem room. And that search was of the widest possible character. 'Not only pathology, but physiology, anthropology, zoology, botany were made to contribute material, and so also were history, chemistry and statistics . . .' After the two discoveries, Cope tells of how he believed it all went wrong:
'It would be difficult to exaggerate the expectations which were aroused by the progress in scientific method implied by these two events. Towards the end of the century the opposition with which Pasteur's work had at first been received gave place to a tendency to look for micro-organisms as the cause of every disease; and so it naturally came to pass that the methods of experimental laboratory research, which had proved so successful with cholera and tuberculosis, were made use of to throw light on the nature and origin of cancer.'
After it was discovered that cancers could be grown artificially in laboratory animals, this seemed to facilitate the investigation of cancer. Laboratory mice grow cancers much more quickly that do humans and they were expendable in a way that a doctor's patients were not. The researcher could use the mouse as he would a test?tube or flask, and throw it away when done with it. Thus cancer research among mice was so much easier that there seemed every justification for the optimism with which Jensen's discovery was regarded. It looked like the solution of the cancer problem.
And so laboratories were built all over the civilised world; huge sums of money were spent; the lives of many scientists were devoted to the quest; and whole libraries of magazine articles and books testified to the scientists' patience, industry and ability. 'And now,' writes Cope, 'after all these years of noble toil, not even the most sanguine research worker can point to anything that can by any stretch of the imagination be termed a solution of the problem which the researchers set out so confidently to answer.'
In 1931, Dr. William Henry Woglom, a great American laboratory cancer researcher, put the results more decisively than most when he summed up the achievements of cancer research, saying that so far as human beings were concerned he was unable to point to any sign of progress whatever.
The May 1955 edition of the Danish Medical Bulletin carried a paper on The Danish Cancer Registry by the registry's director, Dr. Johannes Clemmesen who evidently felt, as Dr Cope did, that cancer research had swung too far towards exclusively animal experimentation. This artificial production of cancers in multitudes of small animals is directed toward discovering, if possible, either before or after they die, how to slow down or stop the deadly cancers inflicted upon the creatures with the laudable purpose of finding out how to alleviate or cure malignant disease in humans. Clemmesen said that its deplorable actual result was that, 'in fifty years and after hundreds of millions spent', their skills had not improved even sufficiently to prevent the ever-increasing numbers of cancers. Like Cope, Clemmesen felt that this swing away from human research was a retrograde step. He urged scientists to make active use of 'the collection of information on the distribution of malignant disease, among various ethnological groups in different regions, in relation to any relevant local factors'.
Which was exactly what the medical missionaries had been urging for decades. Now, yet another 50 years on, it still hasn't happened and we suffer even more cancers.
Cope didn't question the quality or quantity of effort put into laboratory cancer research; what surprised him, I think, was that those engaged in cancer research seemed not in the least discouraged by their total lack of success. 'On the contrary,' he says, 'they seem full of conviction of the imminence of some discovery which will reward them for their industry and patience' while out of a veritable mountain of more than a third of a century's labour, nothing had emerged other than 'a cancer?bearing mouse'.
Cope believed that experimental cancer research had become so isolated and so entrenched that, without being aware of it, researchers almost instinctively regarded those who criticised them or questioned their authority or adopted other methods of working, as being positive enemies. This attitude, of course, stifles innovation and lateral thinking. Cope said that: 'It must ever be held as one of the worst evils of laboratory cancer research that . . . it is responsible for holding up for a generation one of the greatest and most promising advances of the nineteenth century.'
It has now held research up for 4 generations as all of the above is as true today as it was three-quarters of a century ago. If Cope was right, and I see no reason to doubt it, we are still approaching the problem of cancer in entirely the wrong way. But there is hope; there is something we can all do to reduce to a minimum our chances of suffering from cancer. It lies in the way cancers use energy.
Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4: Part 5
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