$14,000,000 Fight

U.S. medicine last week was handed a $14 million purse to fight cancer. The fund, appropriated by Congress, is by far the biggest that cancer fighters have ever had.

Paradoxically, the money will not be easy to spend. Like an army with little manpower and few weapons, cancer fighters must start almost from scratch to map general strategy, recruit and train researchers, build cancer research centers. The U.S. Public Health Service, which will receive the fund, will first have to smooth a few ruffled feathers. Some privately supported research societies are none too pleased over a big appropriation that gives the Government the leadership in cancer research.

PHS is well aware that the battle against cancer will not be won in Washington. The bulk of its money will be spent in grants to universities and hospitals. Some $9,000,000 will be used for research (only $2,000,000 of it at PHS's National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md.), $4,000,000 for cancer control by state health agencies, $1,000,000 for training cancer personnel. Of the research funds, a large part will go into studies to improve the known treatment methods (X rays, surgery, hormones, etc.). But the prime hope for a cancer cure is in fundamental studies of living cells, now being pursued by biologists in many universities. PHS hopes to train its biggest guns on that front.

Top staff officer in the new war against cancer is Dr. Leonard A. Scheele, 40, a tall, soft-spoken Michigander, newly appointed chief of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Scheele is under no illusions that money will quickly solve the cancer problem, as it did the making of the atom bomb. Says he: "We are not in the stage in which the atom was in 1939, when the fundamental principles had been discovered. In cancer we have still not discovered the one or two key secrets which would show us the path."

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