Further evidence on the homogeneity of the resistance to the implantation of malignant new growths / by E.F. Bashford and B.R.G. Russell ; [communicated by J. Rose Bradford].

  • Bashford, Ernest Francis, 1873-
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Further evidence on the homogeneity of the resistance to the implantation of malignant new growths / by E.F. Bashford and B.R.G. Russell ; [communicated by J. Rose Bradford]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    plantations performed on the same date, and that transplantation can be successfully performed in animals in which tumours have already developed 14 days to 10 weeks after the first effective transplantation, i.e., both when the primary tumour is small and when it has attained a large size.” These positive results appeared to be important, first, because of their correspondence with the dissemination and formation of metastases in the normal course of the progress of cancer in man, and, secondly, because they afforded a basis for studying the conditions, favourable and unfavourable, to the establishment of secondary implantations in animals already bearing tumours, and hence had also an indirect bearing on the control of natural metastases. Therefore, these observations formed one of the starting points of our studies on the induction of resistance to the inoculation and growth of cancer. Their importance was enhanced later by the success attending efforts to reproduce experimentally both the local infiltrative and the disseminated lesions of the disease. Other investigators, who, at a later date, were not so successful, either in re-inoculating animals already bearing tumours, or in reproducing the lesions of dissemination, have quite naturally drawn conclusions opposed to those drawn by us; for example, in April, 1906, Ehrlich reported “If metastasis formation be imitated experimentally by re-inoculating animals 8 to 10 days after they had been successfully inoculated with a rapidly growing tumour, then the second inoculation, whether it be made with the same or with a different tumour, does not take with few exceptions ”(1). Ehrlich was led to attach enhanced importance to his observations by the fact that metastases were rare, or, if present, only of microscopical size, in his inoculated animals. He sought an explanation common to the two groups of observations in the assumption of “atreptic” immunity, meaning thereby that the rapidly growing tumour prevented successful re-inoculation and the establishment of metastases by withdrawing special nutritive substances (Substance X) from the circulation. The idea of “ atreptic ” immunity has been extended to explain also the transitory growth of mouse tumours in rats by assuming that growth ceased when the hypothetical Substance X, intro- duced with the graft, was exhausted. Ehrlich (2) modified his standpoint in 1908 in so far as to admit that re-inoculation may be successful although he maintains that the secondary tumours remain smaller than the corresponding tumours in control animals, and therefore he adheres to his assumption of the existence of an “ atreptic ” immunity. The foregoing summary shows that the elucidation of the nature of active resistance to cancer has been complicated both by contradictory observations and by conflicting explanations of facts, regarding which there is complete