Last Work. Final Honors ')79 



live without oxygen for a considerable length of time, and that, 

 owing to the splitting of sugar during their anaerobic growth, 

 an excess of irritant acids was produced in cancer tissue. We shall 

 have cause later again to mention Warburg's suggestion that, to 

 quote Smith,- the " normal resting epithelium is a mosaic in 

 which a few cells are strongly glycolytic, while most are oxidizing 

 cells, and that when for any reason (pressure, sclerosis of vessels, 

 presence of bacteria, etc.) there is a lack of oxygen the non- 

 glycolysing cells perish and the others grow." In rats results had 

 been obtained which pointed, furthermore, to a " glycolytic action 

 of cancerous tissue on grape sugar with production of a great 

 excess of lactic acid." 



" Warburg, in Berlin, has shown," Smith would say in 1926,^ 



both for carcinoma and sarcoma that the malignant cell breaths anaero- 

 bically, even in the presence of air, whereby sugar is split and irritant 

 lactic acid is produced in the tissues continuously. In all these ways the 

 tumor cell behaves unlike a normal cell, but we can not decide from this 

 whether the stimulus to growth is due to a parasite ; to some derangement 

 of the internal mechanism of the cell due to an irritant; or, finally, to 

 some change in the environment of the cell. We might suppose some of 

 the chromosomes destroyed, so that all descendants of the given cell or 

 cell complex would necessarily be abnormal. . . . Warburg believes that 

 anaerobic conditions are the explanation of tumor growth. According to 

 his idea, our bodies and those of all animals are a mosaic of two kinds 

 of cells, the great majority of the cells being aerobic. Under normal con- 

 ditions the few anaerobic cells are controlled and kept in abeyance by the 

 great mass of aerobic ones. Under certain abnormal condition, such, 

 for example, as the influx into an ulcer of aerobic organisms, avid of 

 oxygen and the destruction of the aerating blood vessels, the aerobic cells 

 are killed off and under cover the few anaerobic cells begin to grow rapidly 

 as a tumor. 



Whether malignant tumors have their origin this w^ay or are 

 due to the direct action of parasites, Smith believed that in each 

 the " multiplying extraneous organisms must be the activating 

 thing in most cancers." By 1925 he had read a study * by Dr. 

 Montrose T. Burrow^s, director of laboratories of the Barnard 

 Free Skin and Cancer Hospital of St. Louis, Missouri, in which 



'Some newer aspects of cancer research, Science 61(1589): 596, 597, June 12, 



1925. 



•■' Recent cancer research, A?)ier. Naturalist 60: 247, 255, May- June 1926. 

 * Archives of Internal Medicine, Sept. 15, 1925. 



