AN INTEGRATED 

 CONCEPT OF CARCINOGENESIS* 



HAROLD P. RUSCH, The McArdle Memorial Laboratory, Medical 

 School, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 



Introduction 



In 1937 the Surgeon General of the United States Public 

 Health Service appointed a committee of leading scientists to 

 "formulate, as far as possible, the fundamental aspects of the 

 cancer problem and to suggest various lines of work which 

 merit investigation." The report of this distinguished commit- 

 tee was published in 1938 (5). Some of their most pertinent 

 conclusions were as follows : 



7. The causes of cancer "are multiple and diverse and 

 vary for each type of cancer." 



2. "Once malignancy is established in a cell it becomes an 

 automatic process, independent of the presence of a continuously 

 acting agent of outside origin, and the new character of the cell 

 becomes a fixed one which is passed unchanged to the descend- 

 ants " 



* Adapted from an address delivered before the forty-fifth annual meet- 

 ing of the American Association for Cancer Research, Atlantic City, N. J., 

 April 11, 1954, and published in Cancer Research, 14, 407 (1954). 



Financial support for the preparation of this report was provided by the 

 American Cancer Society Institutional Grant No. 71 A; by the National Cancer 

 Institute, Public Health Service Grant No. C-828 ; and by the Alexander and 

 Margaret Stewart Trust Fund. 



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