162 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
on
occasion? Certainly not. It must be concluded, that in the fertilized egg she
can build up in both directions. By the first few cleavages of the egg—usually
the first three to five—she can separate off portions as cells, endowed solely
with the powers of producing the isomeric compounds of trophoblast, while
retaining for the cell in the line of heredity the property of forming both.
With the start of the evolution of an embryonic body, again by cell-division,
she can separate off one or more original embryonic cells with powers the
opposites of those possessed by trophoblast, all this taking place before any
extra-cellular enzymes, such as trypsin and amylopsin, are formed. Full
agreement, therefore (in a sense), may be expressed with the conclusion of
Duclaux, that “ to introduce in a cell principles immediately different, and
the inverse of those which existed there, it is necessary to act upon it at the
moment when it is most plastic, to take the cell of the germ and try to modify
it” (p. 66). But, as Duclaux also observes, this cell has an heredity, and this
determines not only its being, but what it shall become.
As
may be gathered from the foregoing, the enzyme treatment of cancer professes to
be, and is, a scientific one. Mankind in general, and surgeons in particular,
have long looked for a cure for cancer. Presumably, this was to replace the
knife. Now, at last, science and scientific research have offered not a cure,
but the scientific treatment of and the cure of cancer. At once the
surgical demand was altered into the request for a cure after the fact of
operation on the living cancer. Scientifically, this demand cannot be met.
Cancer is a natural phenomenon, not a disease. To “operate” upon living
asexual generation is unnatural. As a scientific remedy, the enzyme treatment
of cancer makes no claim to be the cure for cancer after it has been interfered
with opera-