Abstract
The biologic problem of the nature and inheritability of spontaneous cancer has been under study in this laboratory for the past twelve years and for ten years the results of that study have been in published form. During this time an increasingly broader and deeper mass of facts, always perfectly consistent, has steadily been obtained. These facts have been presented before scientific societies year by year, and have been published with masses of exact data (1–16).
One of the facts demonstrated in these studies is the inheritability of the tendency to spontaneous cancer, with its strong evidence against the probability of cancer being a specific germ disease.
The more superficial aspect of this demonstration, viz., its practical meaning to the human race, is the phase of the work which has mainly impressed the pathological and medical world. The more profound and biologic aspect of the demonstration has, for the most part, failed to make an impression, and there is a rather wide-spread medical opinion today, backed by some published pathological opinion represented, for example, by Ewing in his Neoplastic Disease, that a demonstration of the inheritability of cancer in mice (which is now quite generally conceded) has no bearing upon the question of the inheritability of cancer in man.
- Received August 2, 1922.
- Copyright © 1922 American Association for Cancer Research
Volume 7, Issue 2
