In 1925, LancetOne of the most prestigious medical magazines in the world, Published by a blockbuster so significant that its editors proposed a rare prelude: “Two messages that follow the event in history medicineThey form a detailed description of a long and intensive study of the origin of malignant new rosts, and they can be a solution to the central problem of cancer. ”
On the day when the studies were to be published, the word was extended beyond the limits of the scientific community. “The crowd gathered on the street near the office Lancet– wrote Peter Visher for Popular scienceThe field “At first it was just such an indescribable meeting, as it happens hundreds of times a day, for some specific reason, in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco. But this crowd waving a minute until it knocked through the strand and broke the usual movement of the street. ”
The crowd, Visher explained: “It was quiet and patient, pulsating with deep excitement.” Rumors, the electrification of London, consisted in the fact that the “Embroidery” was for the first time spying under a microscope.
By the age of 1920, the opening of new microbes became almost commonplace. For almost half a century, during the so -called Golden Age of BacteriologyScientists were busy identifying microbes responsible for many fatal suffering of mankind. Cholera, tuberculosis, tetanus, pneumonia – all were traced to specific “microbes”.
A new discovery of embryos, even for an illness, so feared and poorly understood as cancer, could simply be another heading. However, what allocated this announcement was unlikely by the discovery researchers: the respected London Hatter and the former clerk of railway stations, both outsiders to the official medical institution.
Hatter and railway clerk that have transformed cancer studies
Joseph Edwin Barnard, the Hatter, led what could be freely called the life of Jekyl and a guide-at least without Gothic elements of the horror of the 19th-century cult yarn, Robert Louis Stevenson. In the afternoon, Barnard made hats in the outstanding London Huttersie, J. Barnard and sons founded by his father. At night, he rushed to his private laboratory, which came from the exposure of microbes. Barnard fiddled with new microscopy methods, including ultraviolet light and photographic plates, the development of user lenses and equipment to see outside conventional optics.
The former clerk of the railway station William Evart Gi the Way to Medicine was the same unconventional and much more mysterious -something that even the formidable detective of Arthur Konan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, could puzzle. The railway clerk, born in 1889 in the role of William Evart Burn, changed his surname to Gye in 1919. The reasons remain muddy.
One theory suggests that Gye wanted to avoid confusion With William BullokhA prominent bacteriologist in the London Hospital and Honorary Professor of the University of London. Another theory suggests that in a demonstration of support, he took the name of his wife, Elsa GiAn exciting suffrazhist who restored her girlish name after a campaign for the right of women to vote. The capture of his wife also accidentally cleared up the confusion that pursued the Guy.
However, Popular science reported an even more mysterious story standing behind a change in the name-This is a sick philanthropist named William Evarte Ge (who was conquering the same name and the second name that is obsessed with the Gye microscope) was financed by the Gye medical education and the early studies of cancer, and that Gye has changed its name in gratitude. Another theory suggests that the benefactor was not familiar, but rather the father -in -law of Ge. Regardless of the truth, the change in the name only strengthened its mysterious reputation in the medical community.
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As an unlikely team of advanced cancer research
When Gye and Barnard first met in London, their partnership united two additional skills that were at that time necessary to promote cancer research: Gye skill in experimental biology and the theory of germs that he acquired for long hours in the laboratory, and the exceptional skills of Barnard and visualization techniques. Together, an unusual duet decided to solve the riddle of cancer.
Their cooperation, based on decades of progress, which began in the 1870s, when Robert Koch, a doctor from East Prussia, developed innovative methods for viewing “microbes” under a microscopeThe field of the new contribution of Koch, which included the use of dyes to improve the contrast of the sample, and microphotography to capture microbial images, led to the detection of anthogers and other pathogens. At the same time, the French chemist, Louis Pasteur, developed vaccine Based on these discoveries.
By the 1920s, science And medicine was due to a fairly simple premise: find the embryo, the medicine will follow. That's why Gye and Barnard's Discovery “particles” were announced LancetEditors as an “event in the history of medicine”. Article Barnard V Lancet They turned on photos of what they recorded under his microscope. Some cells are “in sight, have a thickened wall,” Barnard wrote, “while other thin and low visions.” Barnard believed that this difference in thickness was obtained from the virus playing in the cell walls.
Confirming the presence of cancer virus, hope and expectation were that soon there would be a cancer vaccine on the horizon. As Visher said Popular science In October 1925, “Gye and his colleagues in the British Council for Medical Research are now engaged in experiments to develop a cancer vaccine, which will make it impossible for embryo support in the body.”
Although Barnard was considered a lover of a medical institution, his contributions to the hole were unusual. Combining ultraviolet light with ordinary, accurate lenses, he created tools that are sensitive enough to capture individual microorganisms. This required a special ultraviolet light with very short wavelengths measured in billions of meters – the smaller the wavelength, the less an object that can be seen. Barnard microscope was the first to reach such a fine -grained resolution.
Meanwhile, a painstaking study by Ge led him to the proposal of the two -factor theory of cancer, which he described in Lancet In 1925. “Only the virus is ineffective,” Guy writes. “The second specific factor obtained from the tumor extracts breaks the cell protection and allows the virus to infect.”
His theory suggested that cancer did not arise only from the embryo, like tuberculosis. Also, this did not occur exclusively from damaged cells or external stimuli (what we called carcinogens today). Instead, cancer, he theorized, arose from the interaction of cells damaged by external factors and the virus. Gye experiments showed that it cannot produce a tumor using only a virus -containing liquid or only tumor tissue extract. But when he united these two factors, the tumors were reliably formed in chickens.
How cancer studies today are based on the work of Gye and Barnard
Gye's two -factor theory was not completely correct, but it indicated cancer researchers in the right direction. A century, we still do not have a “solution to the central problem of cancer”. However, we can say with confidence that LancetThe prelude was not hyperbolic. As the editors suggested, this discovery would be one of the deepest events in the medical history, which caused the basis of a modern study of cancer at a molecular level.
Today we know that cancer is not the only disease caused by a specific embryo, in combination with damaged cells or external stimuli, but rather a complex group of diseases caused by genetic mutations, environmental factors and, in some cases, viruses, such as such as HPV (human papillomavirus) or EBV (Epstein-Barra virus)Instead of hunting for one embryo, a field indicates their powerful lenses to the inner machine of cells. Today, tools such as Electronic microscopes And Supporting visualization They are used to identify internal cellular structures and molecular pathways that control cell growth and death.
Although the optimism of 1925 was softened by a centenary of complex discoveries without a simple solution, great progress was achieved in cancer prevention, early detection and treatment. Despite the fact that the cancer remains the main cause of death, the treatment protocols appeared that contribute to life to transform the patient's results and ensure real hope for the future. In the end, the discovery of Gi and Barnard was not only about the first to see a cancerous embryo, it was about the fact that science could achieve when it remains accessible to outsiders and maveries with passion and determination to change the situation.
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