Cancer Accident

Eight women and two old men, receiving treatment for cancer at Orlando, Fla., last week became violently ill. With muscles screwed up in agony, they died within a few hours of one another, suffering either from tetanus or from what doctors called "anaphylactic shock." Their deaths were traced to hypodermic injections of a special bacterial filtrate. The physician of the victims, conscientious Dr. Thomas Albert Neal, protested that he had administered 10,000 injections of the filtrate during the past two-and-a-half years "with remarkable success and with no previous ill effects." He announced his belief that one bottle had become contaminated, and when he tested another bottle in his stock on guinea pigs, the pigs died like the patients unless tetanus serum was administered.

First report was that the cancer medicine which Dr. Neal used was an enzyme solution called "Ensol," invented and patented by Dr. Calvin Hendry Cameron Connell of Kingston, Ontario (TIME, Oct. 14, 1935). This started a chain of misunderstandings. Dr. Connell,who has distributed 125,000 bottles of "Ensol" promptly excused himself, because he had never before had an accident. "I am convinced," he announced, "that one bottle became contaminated after it left Kingston." Then investigators of the U. S. Food & Drug Administration, who, fearing another sulfanilamide catastrophe (see above), had ganged up on Dr. Neal, announced that the deadly bottle had come from the Bio-chemical Research Foundation in Philadelphia, an institution financed by Chemical Industrialist Irenee du Pont and headed by Biochemist Ellice McDonald.

The Biochemical Foundation produced thousands of doses of Dr. Connell's cancer serum, and dispensed them under the name of "Rex." But Dr. McDonald last week declared: "Investigation in the laboratories here shows that our bacterial filtrate has no contamination."

From Rochester, N. Y. the newly elected president of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, Surgeon John Jamieson Morton Jr. of the University of Rochester, generally a soft-spoken man, exclaimed: "As far as the medical profession knows, serum in the treatment of cancer is of no value."

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