Vanishing Cancer

Attorney Frank Fowles, 66, is one of Utah's leading citizens. He owns a prosperous Ogden insurance business, has served 20 years in the state senate, is a potential candidate for Governor or Congress. These blessings are minor compared to the latest event in Fowles's life. Early this month his doctors revealed that Fowles had become one of medicine's real rarities--a case of spontaneous cancer regression.

The Operation. A sturdy, calm, active man, Fowles began to feel sick in November 1955. Symptoms: chest pains, short breath, chills and fever. His doctors diagnosed gallstones. Surgeons removed the stones at an Ogden hospital--but also found a spreading cancer in the liver. A postoperative tissue study confirmed the fact; Fowles had metastases throughout his liver and bile ducts from a primary malignancy of the pancreas. Patient Fowles was given no more than 90 days to live. His wife and four children were informed; he was told only that his gallstones had been successfully removed.

Returning to his busy life, Fowles felt healthy. The 90 days passed. "I thought there was something wrong with my wife," he recalls. "She seemed to be going to pieces, and I had no idea why."

Fowles did have one complaint: discomfort from a plastic tube leading out from his liver through an opening in the abdominal wall. His surgeon had installed it as a substitute bile duct during the operation, believing that continued cancer growth would require it. Fowles angrily agitated for its removal. Some 18 months after his first operation, the doctors agreed to "correct" the tube with surgery--and found all signs of cancer gone. "There wasn't a trace," they say. "We looked everywhere." Fifteen months later, there is still no evidence of cancer.

The Phenomenon. Since 1900 there have been only 120 proven cases of such spontaneous regression. Leading regressive cancers: neuroblastoma, a malignancy of the sympathetic nervous system that turns up chiefly in young children, and chorionepithelioma, a very rare malignancy of the placenta in pregnant women. Regression has been recorded only once in carcinoma of the liver, once in carcinoma of the pancreas.

The phenomenon is still a complete mystery. According to Surgeons Tilden C. Everson and Warren H. Cole, who have long studied it at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, there is no single cause, but there are likely combinations of causes. Some people may be able to develop antibodies against a possible cancer virus; others may have hormonal changes that are just right for killing cancer. Nutrition of cancer may also be reduced or regression may follow fever or acute infection. Such possibilities are all remote; but the fact that the body sometimes knows how to kill cancer may some day show the way to man.

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