Industrious Secrecy

Some months ago a group of scientists began in London to work upon a series of experiments whose object they carefully guarded. All were eminent specialists and it was known that they had been funded by the Government--two facts which nourished the outlandish conjectures that soon began to rise around the operations they were conducting with such industrious secrecy. Suddenly it was reported that they had made a discovery. What this was, no gossips could accurately say. All agreed, however, that it was something of vast moment--epochal, recondite, revolutionary. Some averred that these men of science had devised a terrific explosive, others that they had found a way to harness the electron. Wild fellows even declared, in a parched whisper, that they had made a synthetic man.

Months passed. It became clear, for all the absurd extravagance of public rumor, that something unusual was afoot. Last week Mr. John Edwin Barnard, Hon. Secretary of the Royal Microscopical Society, permitted his name to be attached to an announcement: He and his colleagues believed that they had isolated the cancer germ ... A minute disturbance in a ray of light revealed by the most intricate methods of microscopy ever devised... Highly satisfactory experiments upon mice, in whose tissues, inflamed with coal tar, the injected cancer organism produced both sarcoma and carcinoma*. . . Experiments in far too early a stage to warrant any gabble about a cure for cancer . . . Further report to be issued shortly. . . .

Such were the words of Mr. Barnard, a man far too human to say more, too kind to raise the hopes of those men in whose bodies burrow those minute, obscure carriers of death. But to medical men his clipped announcement made the fantastic whispers that had come to them seem duller than the garrulities of a midwife.

* There are two varieties of malignant tumor: the sarcomata, arising from connective tissues; the carcinomata, arising from epithelial tissues. It is customary to describe them both as cancers.