Medicine: Cancer Canard

"We're on the way!" was the exultant quote, and since the source was Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry of the U.S. Public Health Service, and "the way" was supposed to lead to a cure for cancer, the story was big on radio and in the papers. It started as a Terry interview on Washington, D.C.'s WWDC, and U.P.I, picked up parts of it and sent it everywhere. But the full transcript of the Terry interview showed him to be passing on old news, and none too significant at that.

The "drug which has almost certainly cured cancer in man" is no panacea, and Dr. Terry, though too enthusiastic, was careful not to suggest that it is. It cures only some cases of choriocarcinoma, one of the rarest of cancers (about 300 U.S. cases a year). Unlike all other human cancers, choriocarcinoma is derived partly from foreign tissue—from the fetal sac, in the case of women who develop it following pregnancy. In animals (typically, mice in experiments), foreign cancers are easier to cure than the spontaneous disease ; presumably the same is true of man.

The drug (which Dr. Terry did not name) that has produced some encouraging "fiveyear cures" in choriocarcinoma is methotrexate. Its effectiveness in some forms of leukemia and choriocarcinoma has been known for years (TIME cover, July 27, 1959). So has the fact that methotrexate, a highly poisonous substance, is of no value against other cancers unless special techniques of administration are used. And these are not generally available.

The most sobering and significant of Dr. Terry's interview answers got no wide publicity. These were: "I don't think that any one morning we're going to awake and find that we have a complete cure for all types of cancer. When we find a cure for one type of cancer, it will not necessarily be applicable to another type. We'll obviously have many types of cancers many years from now for which we'll have no cure."