From a Sick Chicken

One thing that medicine's learned men once knew, or thought they knew, was that cancer is not infectious. Therefore, no "infectious agent" could be involved in its origin. Then a young (31) researcher just starting in at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, went to work on a sick Plymouth Rock hen. He took material from a tumor on the bird's breast, ground it ultrafine to smash the very cells, filtered the stuff through silica so that not even a broken cell could pass, and injected the liquid into healthy chickens. They soon developed cancers of the same type (sarcoma) as the original hen's.

To the brilliant young investigator, Dr. Francis Peyton Rous (rhymes with mouse), the discovery proved an embarrassment. Some colleagues smiled tolerantly, but many cancer researchers, even within his own institute, denounced the work as preposterous. "A filterable virus?" Bosh! This would be an infectious agent, and thus cancer, they argued, would be an infectious disease. Rous's experiments, they said, must have been defective. Some critics were not even shaken when Rous went on to find the viruses that caused other types of cancers in fowls and small mammals.

Animal or Chemical? Last week, 48 years after his original preconception-shattering experiments, Peyton Rous stood before an audience in Manhattan to acknowledge a new honor in the string that has been lengthening since 1927: one of the Albert Lasker Awards ($2,500 plus a gold Winged Victory) of the American Public Health Association--one of medicine's brightest "Oscars."

There is no longer any doubt that Rous's experiments were superbly executed and that his conclusions were sound. The Rous sarcoma and many others in a growing family of animal tumors are now known to be caused by viruses, although the definition of viruses (ultramicroscopic particles on the borderline of the animal and chemical kingdoms) may have to be revised to cover them all. It still seems that something more than the virus alone is needed to trigger the outbreak of cancerous growth, e.g., chemical or physical irritation. But the importance of the virus can no longer be questioned. Still unknown is whether any human cancers are similarly caused.

Quake in the Night. Blue eyes twinkling as brightly as ever at 79, Dr. Rous admitted last week: "I used to quake in the night for fear that I had made an error." One of his colleagues, he recalled, was so sure that cancer was an unfathomable mystery that he said: "That can't have been a tumor if you found the cause of it." Today no line of investigation into the origins of human cancer is being pressed more vigorously than that implicating viruses as at least partly responsible. Though he has never worked with human cancers, and was technically "retired" for age 14 years ago, Peyton Rous still has the same staff, works as hard as ever hunting clues to cancer's causes, doubles as a consultant to Sloan-Kettering Institute.

Other winners of the 1958 Lasker A.P.H.A. awards:

P: Basil O'Connor, president of the National Foundation (formerly for Infantile Paralysis), first layman ever to be so honored.

P: Dr. Robert W. Wilkins of Boston University, for work on heart-artery diseases.

P: Dr. Theodore Puck of the University of Colorado, for developing new ways to keep mammalian cells reproducing in tissue cultures.

P: Drs. Alfred D. Hershey of Carnegie Institution, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat of the University of California, and Gerhard Schramm of West Germany's Max Planck Institute, jointly, for discoveries concerning nucleic acid's role in virus reproduction and genetics.

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