CANCER THE ANARCHIST

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4768, 24 October 1924, Page 1

CANCER THE ANARCHIST

PUZZLE FOB SCIENTISTS. COMPLICATED RESEARCH. The student of cancer finds himself before his studies have advanced very far, contemplating a state of matters which bears at least a superficial resemblance tb some of the political and economic developments of the present day (says the Edinburgh Review). He is confronted on the- one hand by a vast and complicated: organisation more .Or less perfectly adapted to certain very large purposes ; on the other, by groups, of individuals who have forsaken the larger purposes and are concerned only with themselves. The cancer cell is the supreme example of an anarchist. Like most anarchists, it lives in a complicated society, every member of which depends for its existence on all the other members. Though it was born to citizenship and the duties as well as the privileges of citizenship, it has become a law to itself, and. so an enemy to itjs neighbours. • Theft, assault, and , murder are among its crimes. The analogy is in no danger of being pushed too far. It is so complete that it is actually impossible to say anything of human society and the various ways in which human society can be disrupted, which is not also true of cancer. Man has built his civilisations after the pattern of his own frame ; the greatest evil which threatens them is likewise the greatest evil by which that is assailed. For the human body is a kind of coral island. It is made up not of “ bricks,” which are inanimate material, but of living and moist active individuals. We speak. of “ a man ” as we speak of “ an egg,” but whereas the egg is a single living thing, a man is many things—a whole empire of living creatures, a vast agglomeration of millions and millions of separate “ specks of life,” each with its own existence, its own sensitiveness, its own dim qualities of body, and even of spirit. The cell is ,the microcosm of the man. So much so, indeed, that without stretching the parallel too far we may.speak .of the “ mind of the cell ” and even of its ethic. Indeed, we must so speak, for just as a (State possesses in some curious way an individuality which is without, yet not entirely distinct from, that of any of its citizens, so the man possesses a vision which the cell cannot possess, yet which belongs in a measure to the cell also. If the meaning of cancer as a fact of life is to be grasped this truth must needs be apprehended. The ethic of the cell is both the origin of the law of the body and its consequences.