Medicine: Smoking & Cancer (Contd.)

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Still puffing hard on the trail of whatever it is that makes heavy smokers the commonest victims of lung cancer, the pioneer researchers in the field have brought out another cold-comfort report: the tar from pipes and cigars is as potent a cancer-causing agent to mice as that from cigarettes. The investigators were Dr. Ernest L. Wynder of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute and Adele B. Croninger of St. Louis' Washington University. As co-author they loyally listed their former chief, the late great Surgeon Evarts A. Graham, onetime chain smoker who died of inoperable lung cancer (TIME, March 18, 1957).

In Cancer Research, the investigators describe ingenious mechanical smokers in which they burned pound after pound of pipe, cigar and cigarette tobacco. To make sure that cigarette paper is not a major factor, they had "all-tobacco" cigarettes specially made—wrapped in ordinary cigarette-tobacco leaf. Then they painted the collected tars on the shaved backs of mice, and counted the resulting cancers. While a mouse's back is admittedly not the same as the inside of a man's lung, histologists (tissue specialists) say that it is of essentially the same structure and shows similar reactions.

Cigar and pipe smokers get less lung cancer than heavy cigarette smokers, but more cancer of the mouth. The researchers got at least as many cancers on mice with cigar and pipe tar as with tar from cigarettes (whether paper-or leaf-wrapped). So, they conclude, if smoking is to be eliminated as a cause of cancer, the dangerous substances must be eliminated from all forms of tobacco.