Abstract
THE thirty-first Bedson Lecture was delivered by Prof. J. W. Cook, of the Cancer Hospital, London, to the Bedson Club at Armstrong College, Newcastle-on-Tyne, on November 8. Prof. Cook took as his subject “The Synthesis and Biological Effects of Carcinogenic Hydrocarbons”, and said it has long been known that certain forms of skin cancer are due to occupational causes, such cases being prevalent among workers in the coal-tar and allied industries, in the shale oil industry and among mule spinners in cotton mills. This is due to the action of a common constituent of coal tar, and shale and lubricating oil, the isolation and identification of which was successfully accomplished about three years ago in the research laboratories of the Cancer Hospital, London. A very valuable guide in the difficult task of separating this substance from the other constituents of the mixtures was provided by the fact that these tars and oils having carcinogenic properties are all strongly fluorescent. An investigation of the nature of this fluorescence spectrum directed attention to the benzanthracene group of hydrocarbons. Many of these have been prepared artificially in the laboratory, and some have been shown capable of producing cancer in mice. The cancer-producing constituent of coal tar, etc., benz-pyrene, belongs to this group. More recently, it has been found possible to bring about the artificial conversion of substances normally present in the human body, namely, cholic and deoxycholic acids, into a hydrocarbon of the benzanthracene type, methylcholanthrene, and this was found to be more powerfully cancer-producing than any other substance yet investigated. The chemical changes by which it was obtained are of the type which are well known to occur in the body, and it may be that cancer in man is due to some such substance as a bile acid undergoing decomposition in an abnormal manner, with conversion into cancer-producing substances.
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Research on Carcinogenic Compounds. Nature 136, 788 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136788a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136788a0
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