THE NEARER CAUSES OF CANCER

Abstract

More than twenty-five years have passed since man first learned how to call forth cancer for his purposes. Throughout the centuries he has seen it follow on exposure to sunlight and watched it arise in old scars; yet only so recently has he felt any need to produce it. By 1915 though, the task had become inevitable and insistent: to get on further with the cancer problem, to grapple with immediate causes, the searcher had to study the disease at its origin. Now he can call it forth in any one of many ways and follow its emergence from hour to hour if he chooses. Yet still he is like an Aladdin who calls forth a genie that he does not understand, much less control; and the meetings of societies for cancer research are like gatherings of Aladdins, with great talk of how most surely to evoke the genii, and