By Bruce Mirken
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds, but some enthusiasts may be going too far.
In his 1971 State of the Union speech, President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, prompting passage of the National Cancer Act, aimed at making the "conquest of cancer a national crusade." Just four years later, scientists from the National Cancer Institute published a study demonstrating that a group of compounds taken from a common, widely cultivated plant shrank lung tumors that had been implanted in mice, extending their survival.
In a world that made sense, this plant and the anticancer drugs it produced would have been rushed into further testing, and we'd have known in a few years whether they had potential as treatments for human cancers. Instead, research proceeded at a glacial pace, with almost no further progress till the 1990s. Since then, vast quantities of lab and animal data have confirmed those early findings, but studies of these plant compounds in actual human beings with cancer remain nearly nonexistent.
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds, but some enthusiasts may be going too far.
In his 1971 State of the Union speech, President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, prompting passage of the National Cancer Act, aimed at making the "conquest of cancer a national crusade." Just four years later, scientists from the National Cancer Institute published a study demonstrating that a group of compounds taken from a common, widely cultivated plant shrank lung tumors that had been implanted in mice, extending their survival.
In a world that made sense, this plant and the anticancer drugs it produced would have been rushed into further testing, and we'd have known in a few years whether they had potential as treatments for human cancers. Instead, research proceeded at a glacial pace, with almost no further progress till the 1990s. Since then, vast quantities of lab and animal data have confirmed those early findings, but studies of these plant compounds in actual human beings with cancer remain nearly nonexistent.
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Source: AlterNet
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