The Great Enigma

The $100,000 prize for a " medicinal treatment for the effective cure of cancer" offered by Lord Atholstan, Montreal newspaper publisher (TIME, April 7), is attracting world-wide attention. Since the offer was made public, January 2, 1922, in a letter to Sir Arthur Currie, President of McGill University, more than 3,000 claims of cures have been submitted from 40 different nations. Some 400 are from faith healers, auto-suggestionists and other brands of fanatics. Of the others, many are palpably quackish or too weirdly fantastic to warrant investigation. Almost every plant known to botany has been claimed as a specific, with bloodroot an easy first. Red clover chopped fine, a diet of snails and mud baths have their advocates. Lord Atholstan is the first Canadian-born peer to be raised to the House of Lords for services to the Empire. He is a self-made man who joined the staff of the Montreal Gazette at the age of 18, and at 21, with a capital of $100, he combined with George T. Lanigan, the writer, to establish the Montreal Star. Cancer is the great enigma of medical science. Many of the most dreaded diseases have been brought under control or greatly mitigated--smallpox with vaccine, typhoid fever with chlorination, diphtheria with antitoxin, tuberculosis with an all-round hygienic program, yellow fever with mosquito control, leprosy with chaulmoogra oil, diabetes with insulin. But cancer goes marching on with no apparent check. Indeed, the cancer death rate in the registration area of the United States has risen gradually but steadily until in 1921 it was 86 per 100,000 population, which would indicate that there are in the continental United States about 93,000 deaths a year from cancer, and this is probably 20% below the actual number. This rise may be due in part to greater efficiency in diagnosis and earlier recognition, as the rate is highest in states which have the most accurate certification of deaths. But the fact of the menace remains. Cancer is confined largely to middle life and old age, and is higher in the northern than the southern states, although this is not due to the race factor. Cancer is curable--if taken in time. Surgery and deep X-ray or radium treatment are so far the only proved remedies. Progress in the latter methods has recently been rapid. But the rub lies just in the fact that the malady is seldom discovered until it is too late when the lawless growth of the cancer cells has gotten a fatal hold on the healthy tissue.