Pure but Practical

"There is a great period of darkness in our understanding of what this tiny gangster does when he enters the body. He disappears for about 14 days after he enters the body and before he shows up in a living cell. It may be that a knowledge of his movements in that two weeks' spree will lead to some method of blocking his entrance. . . ."

So last week declared Dr. William Charles White of the National Institute of Health addressing the National Tuberculosis Association in Boston. The hiding gangster he spoke of was the tuberculosis bacillus. Dr. White announced that a grant had been made to study the bacillus under the new world's biggest "cyclotron" or atom-smashing machine at the University of California, which weighs 225 tons and has just produced a record-breaking beam of 19,000,000-volt particles. By stuffing the bacillus with radioactive phosphorus produced in cyclotron bombardments, the California researchers will ry to make it give off a continuing stream of telltale emanations. Then, after injection into laboratory animals, the emanating germ's first furtive fortnight may be observed.

The cyclotron is a type of atom-smasher which speeds atomic projectiles up to enormous energies by whirling them in magnetic fields. When the University of California's smart, jovial Physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence invented it about a decade ago, it was used for the purest sort of research in experimental physics. Three years ago the cyclotron switched from pure science to practical science when it was discovered that beams of neutrons produced by the cyclotron destroyed cancer cells in mice. A regular program of medical cyclotron work was set afoot, in charge of the inventor's brother, Dr. John Hundale Lawrence, who has a medical degree from Harvard. One of his latest discoveries, announced last week, is that different types of cancer cells assimilate the element phosphorus at different rates. This was learned by attaching radioactive tags to phosphorus atoms and shooting them into cancerous mice. It may eventually yield valuable clues for cancer treatment.

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