The Cause of Cancer?

Two experts rattled the test tubes of research labs this month with claims of far-reaching discoveries about the cause of cancer and, in particular, the mechanism of leukemia, cancer's blood brother. The biggest claim was filed by Nobelman Otto Warburg, head of Berlin's famed Max Planck Institute for Cell Physiology. Said Warburg, as translated in Science: P: The cancer process begins when cells are injured by being starved of oxygen.

P: This injury is irreversible. It kills some cells, but others survive, and these survivors learn to nourish themselves in an abnormal way. Instead of getting energy by "breathing" oxygen, they get it by fermentation. Though maimed, they multiply, and pass on their abnormal metabolism to their offspring.

P: Fermentation is inefficient, so the cancer cells do not become highly specialized, like normal cells; they grow wildly, like gargantuan adolescents that never mature.

P: All recognized "causes" of cancer, e.g., chemicals, X rays, viruses, are of secondary importance because they are merely responsible for the original injury to cells by depriving them of oxygen. This deprivation is the one basic cause of the disease.

An acknowledged master in the field, Warburg, 72, brooked no quibble. "The era in which [my theory] could be disputed is over, and no one today can doubt that we understand the origin of cancer cells." There were disputers nonetheless. One of them Copenhagen's Dr. Jorgen Kieler, told a leukemia conference at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit: "This concept cannot be accepted without reservations." Dr. Kieler showed that under certain conditions leukemic cells "breathed" at the same rate as normal cells. This contradicts Warburg's belief that the respiration of all cancer cells has been irreversibly damaged.

From Dr. Thomas F. Dougherty of the University of Utah came an equally dogmatic though less sweeping theory. Leukemic cells, said Dr. Dougherty, survive and flourish because they can do something that ordinary white blood cells cannot. At the Detroit meeting he had microphotographs to show that leukemic cells can break down hydrocortisone (circulating in the body fluids) into five parts and use one part as a growth stimulator. Fellow experts at Detroit were not convinced. Leukemic cells, they pointed out, are of half a dozen different kinds, and no generalization about them is safe.

The upshot seemed to be that Warburg and Dougherty have supplied promising leads, but the proof of their theories must await time's test.

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