1978 Articles

Cancer Biology: Cancer Invasion and Metastasis . Biologic Mechanisms and Therapy. Papers from a workshop, New York, Dec. 1976. Stacey B. Day, W. P. Laird Myers, Philip Stansly, Silvio Garattini, and Martin G. Lewis, Eds. Raven, New York, 1977. xxii, 518 pp., illus. $35. Progress in Cancer Research and Therapy, vol. 5.

Pollack, Robert

The baseline for studying either invasion or metastasis is an animal bearing, or about to grow, a malignant tumor. Such animals do not provide the easiest or the best-defined systems for biochemical or genetic analysis of either malignant process. But we try our best. This book, the record of a meeting at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital, summarizes work on the subject quite well. In most cases the news is not good. Because scientists studying metastasis are dealing with a second-order (albeit lethal) event, they have no normal controls, only differences among already cancerous cell populations. Still it comes as a surprise to learn from these clinical and wholeanimal studies that among the agents that increase metastasis in an animal (or a person) with a bad tumor are x-rays at the primary tumor site, glucocorticoids, and general anesthetics. That is, because of our ignorance of basic mechanisms, the triumvirate of therapies we use for the initial tumor (radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgery) may well be sowing iatrogenic metastases. Clearly, basic mechanisms must be intensively studied if we are ever to follow Hippocrates and "do no harm" while treating cancer.