236 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
research,
which led the writer to throw aside absorbing work on the problems of Heredity
and Germinal Continuity, and take up one branch of his studies—cancer, or
asexual generation, or trophoblast.
Whether
the sum be millions of dollars or not, unquestionably very large
amounts—thousands of pounds sterling yearly—have been expended in recent years
on cancer research in England alone.* And the result of eight years’ of work
and “ research” ? Chi lo sa ! True, the official researchers and others
often speak or write about the “cause “ of cancer, as if the “ cause “ were a
legitimate object of their quest, and—in ignorance of the teachings of Carl
Ernst von Baer, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and other great investigators—that
“causes” are beyond the range of scientific research.**
(cont. from p. 235) a general principle. “You are wrong.
If you get a general principle you can keep right on the whole, and supplement
your information as you go along. If you get a particular direction, and take a
single wrong turning, you are done for ever.”
* It should not be forgotten that the cancer researches recorded in
this book cost the Carnegie Trust (Universities of Scotland) Research Fund the
sum of seventy pounds sterling (₤70). Of this sum, fifty shillings, the
price paid for a certain dog, was lost, owing to the then ignorance of myself
and of an Edinburgh surgeon that chloroform is fatal to dogs. Fifty pounds was
expended in the wages of a youth being framed to do microscopical work
(preparation and staining of sections) for me. When trained, he had to accept
another situation I So that the actual balance-sheet of these researches upon
cancer works out to the magnificent sum of seventeen pounds ten shillings.
** The latest pronouncement of official cancer research is contained in
“The Ingleby Lectures on Advances in Knowledge of Cancer” (the Lancet, June
10, 1911, pp. 1596-1597). It concludes as follows: “What had to be found was,
how to imitate the process of natural healing, and how not to hunt on false
tracks after curative sera on the analogies of diphtheria antitoxin or
cytotoxic sera; till then the surgical treatment must remain a rational and the
only treatment; but in the end it ought not to be beyond human ingenuity to
find out and imitate the mechanism of the natural healing of cancer.” This
latter (cont. on p. 237)