Sucklings' Cancer

"The most important basic medical discovery of the present generation"; -- so one scientist called it. He referred to the theory that mice may get cancer from a virus in their mothers' milk.* This was reported in Science last week by Geneticist John Joseph Bittner, of the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me., where scientists have worked on this problem for more than seven years.

Dr. Bittner used two families of mice; in Family A, almost all the mice for many generations developed cancer of the breast; in Family B, cancer seldom occurred. Dr.

Bittner took a number of newborn mice from Family A away from their cancerous mothers, set them to suckle immune mothers in Family B; then he set babies from the immune family to the breasts of females in the cancerous family. (None of these "wet nurses" had yet developed tumors.) Result: the young mice switched their cancer tendencies. Those who came from healthy stock developed cancer; those who were ordinarily doomed to cancer remained healthy. Their offspring were also healthy.

Most doctors last week agreed that the experiments raised two important points:

1) they offered new evidence for the belief that in many cases the erratic process of cancer may be started by a virus;

2) they showed that an inherited tendency to breast cancer may possibly be averted by simple precautions. Said Dr. Bittner last week: "It may be that women with breast cancer in their family should not nurse their daughters."

* The theory does not imply that milk causes cancer. In fact, top-flight Researcher Cornelius Packard Rhoads of Manhattan's Memorial Hospital believes that milk contains a protein substance which helps protect rats against a certain type of cancer produced by chemicals.

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