Medicine: Mustard against Cancer

When & if a cancer cure ever develops, present indications are that it will be found among the more virulent poisons. Reason: only the deadliest artillery (e.g., poisonous radioactive materials, X rays) can kill a cancer cell. Out last week was the news that during World War II, U.S. cancer specialists had launched an uncommonly interesting study of the cancer-killing possibilities of mustard gas.

Mustard gas was a World War I terror. For World War II, chemists developed (but never used) a variation called “nitrogen mustard” (substituting nitrogen for sulphur). In studying defenses against the new product, they noticed that nitrogen mustard had a special affinity for cells that grow rapidly. Why not try it against cancer cells?

A team of cancer researchers (including groups at Manhattan’s Memorial Hospital, the University of Chicago, the University of Utah) got busy on the delicate task of concocting a healing dose of mustard. They eventually settled on four intravenous injections, on successive days, of minute amounts (five to seven milligrams) of the poison.

Even these tiny shots induced vomiting, destroyed some blood-forming tissue in the bone marrow and lymph glands. But they did attack certain types of cancer.

Last week, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the University of Chicago group reported that of 54 patients, most got some relief: their fever and malaise disappeared, their tumors subsided, they gained weight, some went back to work. Nitrogen mustard sometimes worked after X rays had become ineffective. Best results were against incurable Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes. Although Hodgkin’s is almost invariably fatal, one Chicago patient, a young commercial artist, has been kept in good working health for 33 months by periodic mustard treatments. Nitrogen mustard, the doctors warned, is not a cancer cure. But it i) relieves some patients’ suffering for months at a time, 2) has encouraged researchers to think that they may be on the right track.