Introduction

THE FAILED CRUSADE 177
to cancer. But to the growing ranks of geneticists, cell biologists, molecular
biologists, and virologists studying the disease, the epidemiologist
road led nowhere. How did those chemicals turn the body’s cells into
out-of-control mutants How did one account for the majority of cancers
that seemingly had no environmental cause One could spend an
entire career giving mice cancer by exposing them to carcinogens. How
would this knowledge help cure someone who already had the disease
“By the 1960s, the wider scientific community . . . became dismissive,
viewing the research on chemical carcinogenesis as an intellectually
bankrupt enterprise—nothing more than a mountain of facts with few
good ideas propelling it forward,” Robert A. Weinberg, one of the
nation’s leading research scientists, wrote in his chronicle of the scientific
history of the war on cancer. 25
Virologists, cellular biologists, and geneticists rushed in to fill the
void. The viral theory of cancer, first enunciated by Peyton Rous in 1911,
had virtually disappeared from scientific discussion by the 1930s. But in
the late 1950s, it was resuscitated by Sarah Stewart and Bernice Eddy,
longtime researchers at the NIH labs in Bethesda. They discovered a
virus that induced tumors when injected in mice. They dubbed it the
polyoma because the cancers included solid tumors as well as tumors of
the blood. The discovery created a stir among the growing number of
geneticists interested in the cancer problem, including genomics pioneer
James Watson, who referred to the NIH scientists as “two old ladies” in
a talk he gave at his Long Island laboratories to spread the news to a
wider audience. Viruses were the smallest known organisms and had
very short genetic sequences, Watson noted. If they caused cancer, the
number of genes in the host cell that were affected by the virus also must
be quite small and were therefore identifiable. 26
Other scientists began replicating and expanding the Stewart-Eddy
work. In 1962 virologists in Houston found that the human adenovirus,
which causes common respiratory infections, induced tumors in hamsters.
Two years later, British virologists discovered virus particles in cells
of lymphoma patients in Africa. The cancer-virus connection also began
gaining treatment adherents. In the late 1950s, scientists working in
France had identified an antiviral protein given off by cells when they
were attacked by viruses. They dubbed it interferon. It would be nearly
two decades before interferon could be isolated and produced through
biotechnology means. But in those early days, a number of researchers
began to believe that if viruses caused cancer, then interferon might prevent
or cure it through its antiviral activity. 27