Medicine: Cancer Blue

Cancer is a wildfire growth of rebel cells. Why and how normal cells suddenly go haywire and pile up into malignant tumors is the crucial research problem in cancer today. Last week, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Milwaukee, Dr. Herbert Eugene Schmitz and James Ernest Davis of Chicago’s Mercy Hospital prodded the dark cancer whirlpool with one more little ray of light.

For a long time, they said, researchers have known that cancer cells consume an abnormally small amount of oxygen. To find out why, Drs. Davis and Schmitz probed an enormous rat tumor, discovered small pockets of poisonous cyanogen gas along its borders. They also confirmed the presence of cyanogen along the edges of a human tumor. Cyanogen gas, in minute amounts, is a normal cellular waste product, ordinarily passed out into the blood stream through porous cell walls.

Normally present in veins is a white chemical called indigo, which unites with the oxygen in fresh blood and turns blue.* Usually indigo flows with the blood stream to various organs, surrenders its oxygen and turns white again. But when fresh blood reaches tissues bloated with cyanogen, the indigo gets stalled and cannot give up its oxygen. Between the cyanogen and the indigo blue cells are unable to receive any nourishment, and thus, Drs. Davis and Schmitz suggested, the process of tumor development begins. How this vicious circle could be broken they did not venture to say.

*Not to be confused with the plant indigo, which yields a blue dye.