Medicine: Doctors at Work

It was Medical Research Week at Atlantic City, N.J., last week as 13,000 biological scientists and physicians gathered to hear some 3,000 papers presented by three professional fellowships: the American Association for Cancer Research, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, and the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. Among the highlights:

¶ Dr. Ernest L. Wynder of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute has discovered that a nonflammable part of a waxlike chemical in tobacco smoke acts to inhibit substances that can cause cancer. The anticancer agent (Wynder once thought that the entire substance caused cancer) is also present in auto fumes, where it seems to block cancer-causing substances more effectively—despite the fact that auto exhausts contain 60 times more of the cancer-causing agents. Wynder warned that the presence of the waxlike chemical in tobacco tar does not prevent lung cancer, hopes that eventually enough of the chemical can be added to cigarettes to eliminate the need for filters.

¶ Pursuing a trail of medical mystery that he began in Chicago 25 years ago, Dr. Otto Saphir reported that the rising incidence of arteriosclerosis among persons under 40 may be caused by hypersensitivity to certain drugs. After injecting sulfathiazole into the blood vessels of previously treated rabbits, Saphir found the same kind of scars as in arterio sclerosis that occurs in old age. Such scars or blocks can contribute to heart attacks.

¶ The essence of heredity—the delicately complex deoxyribonucleic acid known as DNA—has been extracted virtually intact from human sperm for the first time by Doctors Ellen Borenfreund and Aaron Bendich. The "almost impossible" feat promises to shed new light on the transmission of hereditary traits in mammals and on the origin of genetic abnormalities. After experiments with the sperm of fish and fowl, rabbits and bulls, the Manhattan researchers carefully washed the human sperm to rid it of enzymes, then treated the DNA tough protein topcoat with a chemical that freed the 400,000 chainlike DNA molecules for examination.