CANCER AS A PROBLEM IN METABOLISM

Abstract

Cancer has taken an enormous toll of human lives for the last three thousand years. It is only within the last thirty-five years that this disease has been studied from the experimental point of view. Woglom,¹ in the annual Gross lecture of the Philadelphia Pathologic Society in 1931, divided the latter period into three decades. In the first decade the limits within which malignant tumors can be transplanted were determined; a method of protecting against their inoculation was found; the resistance of the cancer cell to various agents was compared; its cultivation in vitro was begun; the hereditary nature of cancer in mice was predicated, and a transmissible sarcoma of the fowl was discovered. In the second decade the rate of growth of the cancer cell was determined, and two methods of producing tumors experimentally were discovered. In the third decade another method of inciting the growth of tumors