Rare, Please

One cause of cancer may be burned food, such as overdone, charcoal-broiled steaks. This startling suggestion came last week from one of the world's greatest authorities, the University of Chicago's Dr. Charles Brenton Huggins, 59, who has saved countless lives by developing effective treatments for prostate and breast cancers.

So far, Dr. Muggins has no direct evidence to prove his theory. He got the idea from a valuable research technique he recently developed for inducing cancers quickly in female rats (of a particular inbred strain), to which he gives a single feeding of 7.12-dimethyl-benz(a)anthracene. It works every time.

Nobody will ever find DMBA, as Huggins calls it to save breath, on a steak-house menu. It is one of several complex hydrocarbons that may be produced when vegetable and animal substances are subjected to very high temperatures. (Some are produced when tobacco burns at 1.300DEG to 1,600DEG F. in a cigarette.) They can be used to cause cancer in certain animals. Said Dr. Huggins: "If breast cancer can be caused in rats with one feeding of DMBA, the same may also occur in humans. I'm not saying that it does--just that it could happen. We know nothing about what foods or what methods of cooking could be blamed. But it's possible that DMBA can be produced by overcooking. I never order a well-done charcoal-broiled steak. It's rare for me.''

By coincidence, suggestive evidence along the same line was reported simultaneously from Iceland to the International Academy of Pathology in Chicago. Said Dr. Niels Dungal: Icelanders have one of the world's highest death rates for stomach cancers; they eat a lot of smoked fish, and extracts from the smoke have caused stomach cancer in rats.

If viruses cause some human cancers, as many medical researchers suspect, why is it that nobody can find the guilty particles in cancer cells? To this baffling question a brilliant French investigator offered an answer last week, and said he had found substantial proof for it. Dr. Joseph Huppert. 41, of the Institut Pasteur, gave his report to Manhattan's SIoan-Kettering Institute.

Dr. Huppert began with the generally accepted fact that a normal cell contains chemically coded information--in ribonucleic acid (RNA) or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)--which determines how it reproduces itself. But, he suggested, ''a cell may acquire some wrong genetic information,' perhaps through the entry of a virus into the cell. The virus need not necessarily multiply within the cell; all that is necessary is for a piece of the virus' RNA or DNA to be substituted for part of the cell's normal nucleic acid.

In many, if not in most cases, this process will simply mean that the cell cannot reproduce because it cannot use the miscoded instructions. But in a few cases, said Dr. Huppert. it will incorporate the "foreign" information and reproduce abnormally, starting a cancer. The likelihood of this is increased when an other, non-cancer-causing virus happens to be present. Dr. Huppert said he and his colleagues have induced tumors in animals with the nucleic-acid "core'' of a virus found in a human tumor.

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