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     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-

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