156 THE
ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
Brault
thought that the malignancy of a tumour varied directly as its richness in
glycogen. Another medical man, impressed with this view, sought some substance
which would “break up” this glycogen of a tumour, and hit upon trypsin. But the
curious thing is that not only, of course, has trypsin no action upon the
glycogen of a cancer, but the like is true of amylopsin. The latter at once
converts the dextro-glycogen of the liver, but as Dr. Cleaves has shown in her
paper already cited, amylopsin has no action upon the glycogen occurring
naturally in a cancer. The reason is because the latter glycogen is a
laevo-one. The interpretation to be placed upon the leucocytic phenomena of the
Cleaves “trypto-glycogenic reaction (the enormous increase of the eosinophile
leucocytes under the enzyme treatment of cancer and their attraction by the
glycogen of the tumour) is that amylopsin leaves the glycogen of a cancer
untouched, but that it stimulates the leucocytic to seize it and to invert it.
Just as isomeric compounds in the form of starches occur in both generations of
plants, so also isomeric compounds of glycogen or animal starch are found in
sexual and asexual generations of animals, including cancer. But, if the dextro-compound
occur naturally in the one generation, the laevo- one will obtain in the other.
Mellor remarks p. 364) that only the dextro-sugars or glucoses are known to
occur naturally. This is because the chemical composition of the sexual
generation of any plant, a fern prothallus for example, has never yet been
determined in the laboratory It is not true of animal life, for as long ago as
1855 Claude Bernard * found laevulose or laevo-sugar in “the allantois.”
According to him, (p. 398) it disappears towards the fifth or sixth month of
* Bernard, Claude Lecons de Physiologie
Expérimentale,’ Paris, 1855, vol. i.