Pres Ae PISICATION ;OF. (EXPERIMENT 
bey hak Shy DpYy OF (CANCER 
By E. F. BASHFORD, M.D. 
General Superintendent of Research and Director of the Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer 
Research Fund 
Doematic statements regarding the nature of cancer have 
broken more reputations than they have made. Paradoxical 
as it may be, progress in our knowledge of cancer has been 
made mainly by failure, by successive generations of investi- 
gators proving the insufficiency of the knowledge and the 
hypotheses of their predecessors; but this applies equally to 
the advancement of knowledge in many fields. The advance- 
ment of knowledge by the process of exclusion is surely the 
most tedious of methods, since, beyond all else, it signifies 
inability to formulate correctly the problem which it is sought 
to solve. We are still struggling to formulate correctly the 
problem, or better, problems of cancer, the sum of our facts 
not yet sufficing for an unequivocal statement of a problem 
which shall finally rid us of the everlasting question, What is 
the cause of cancer? We must be patient of the necessity for 
undertaking destructive work. In the face of the many defeats 
efforts at constructive work have suffered in the past, we must 
be mindful that hypotheses and theories, like men, ‘‘may rise on 
stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.” Finally 
the truth is elicited. While avoiding dogmatic statements, I 
hope to show that the application of experiment to the study of 
cancer is rational to-day, and has advanced in four or five years 
to a stage where the results have become of constructive value. 
In the space of a short article it is impossible to give an 
adequate account of the many aspects from which “ cancer” 
requires to be studied. I propose to consider mainly the 
application of the experimental method to the study of growth, 
and to show how greatly knowledge has advanced since the 
first experiment on cancer was made in 1773. At that time 
I 
