CANCER RESEARCH

Evening Star, Issue 23697, 3 October 1940, Page 14

CANCER RESEARCH

ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT Cancer researchers were much . excited last year when Drs I*’. Kogl and H. Erxlebeu announced in the ‘ Zcitschrift fur Physiologische Chcmie ’ an important difference between the chemical patterns of cancer and normal cells, says the ‘ New York Times.' To explain their announcement we must begin with proteins, which are the more important constituents of beefsteak, white of egg. milk. When we eat a piece of meat we do not convert its protein directly into muscle, which is again protein. We break that meat down into auimo acids, and out of these amino acids we build our muscles, livers, and lights. There are about 25 or 30 of these amino acids Turn a beam of polarised light on one (that is, a beam of light which vibratos only in one plane), and it is twisted either to the right or to the left. Kogl and Erxlebeu -lainied that cancers are built up of light-

handed amino acids, healthy muscles of tho left-handed kind. It looked as if a milestone in the history of both physiology and cancer had been erected. In a recent number of ‘ Science ’ Drs Frite Lipmann, Otto K. Behrens, Elvin A. Kabit, and Dean Burk, of Cornell, the National Cancer Institute, and the United States Public Health Service, shatter this dream. Kogl isolated a few of the amino acids from healthy and cancerous tissues, and tested them with polarised light. It now turns out that this isolation procedure was probably incomplete, and that the samples tested were not representative. Drs Lipmann, Behrens, Kabit, and Burk digested both healthy and abnormal tissues with hydrochloric acid for seven to 15 hours and then tested them with a particular enzyme (an organic substance that brings about chemical reactions without taking part in them) which affects only the unnatural amino acids—that is, the ones that twist a beam of polarised light to the right. Thus tested, all and not only some of the unnatural and natural acids in normal atul cancerous tissue were differentiated at one foil swoop. It was found that tho quality of so-called unnatural

amino acids is about the same both in cancel's and in good muscle. We have to write off another disappointment in cancer research.