Who Woulda Thought? ~ Fascinating Answer

I've been caught up lately reading books on not-so-uplifting topics like cancer and medical research.  It began with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and has continued with The Emperor of All Maladies.  In the process, I am taken aback by how barbarically this insidious disease has been treated in the past and how relatively new our knowledge is about possibly more "humane," effective ways to fight cancer.  Despite my alarm, it has been a fascinating read.

And now for the answer to yesterday's question, I quote directly from  The Emperor.....

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"The chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that...can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes.  The trouble lies in finding ...a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient...The hunt for such specific, systematic poisons was precipitated by the search for a very different sort of chemical.  The story begins with colonialism and...cotton.  In the mid-1850's, as ships from India and Egypt...unloaded their goods in English ports, cloth milling boomed into a spectacularly successful business in England...

The cloth-milling boom set off a boom in cloth dyeing...Cloth dyes had to be extracted from perishable vegetable sources...The textile industry needed...to synthesize products for textile dyeing...In 1856, William Perkin...stumbled upon...aniline mauve (which was) cheap and imperishable - vastly easier to produce and store than vegetable dyes....

Aniline mauve was discovered in England, but dye making reached its chemical zenith in Germany....By the mid-1880's, Germany had emerged as the...'dye basket' of Europe...emboldened by their successes, the chemists began to synthesize not just dyes and solvents, but an entire universe of new molecules...

In 1828, a Berlin scientist...(conducted an experiment with) enormous implications...For centuries, the chemistry of living organisms was thought to be imbued with some mystical property, a vital essence that could not be duplicated in the laboratory...Wohler's experiment...(proved that) organic and inorganic chemicals...were interchangeable.  Biology was chemistry...

It took a full fifty years after Wohler's...experiment for (synthetic) products of the dye industry to finally make contact with living cells..(Forward to) Ehrlich...(who) began looking for a 'curative substance' in a familiar place: the treasure trove of dye-industry chemicals...His laboratory was now...located near the booming dye factories of Frankfurt...With thousands of compounds available to him, Ehrlich embarked on a series of experiments to test their biological effects on animals...their first antibiotic hit: a brilliant ruby-colored dye derivative...called Trypan Red..His successes ...proved that diseases were just pathological locks waiting to be picked by the right molecules....

(Forward to) 1915...as (Germany) pitched itself into the First World War.  The dye factories that had once supplied therapeutic chemicals...were converted to massive producers of chemicals that would be turned into precursors for war gases.  One particularly toxic gas...became known as mustard gas....(Its) acute, short-term effects...were simply so monstrous that its long-term effects were overlooked.  In 1919, a pair of American pathologists...found that the survivors (of mustard gas inhalation) had an unusual condition of the bone marrow...the (bone marrow stopped producing white blood cells)....(Forward to the 1940's and researchers were asking) could this effect, or some etiolated cousins of it, be harnessed in a controlled setting, in a hospital, in tiny, monitored doses, to target malignant white cells?"

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I recommend that you read the book to continue on this fascinating, if not slightly morbid, tale of everyday heroes trying to understand cancer and seek out a cure in the most unlikely of places.  In fact, I highly recommend the delicious pleasures of reading the written word on all kinds of subjects.  It opens up the world in ways we will never be able to experience in a single lifetime.