NEW LABORATORY FOR STUDY OF CANCER TO BE OPENED BY COMMISSION

The new laboratory for the study of cancer which has been erected adjoining the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital will be opened next Monday by the Cancer Commission of the University, thus adding one more building to the imposing group of hospitals and laboratories which surround the Medical School.

While the new structure includes chemical and pathological laboratories for the work of those departments of the Cancer Commission, the greater part of its space is occupied by laboratories for the study of a special and important field of science--that of bio-physics, a department in which the physicist and the biologist meet and work in co-operation to apply to complicated biological problems the accurate measurements, the immutable laws, and the mathematical methods of the physicist.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of apparatus in the building is that devised and set up by Professor Bovie and Professor E. L. Chaffee '08 for the measurement of the electrical changes induced in the retina of the eye by the action of light. The minute changes in electrical potential thus induced are amplified by special electrical apparatus to such a degree as to permit the measurement and recording of a reaction produced by the briefest exposure to a source of light equivalent to only one-millionth of a candle power.

With the construction of this new building the work of these various laboratory departments, hitherto scattered throughout the laboratories of the Medical School and even in those of the Department of Physics, is all brought under one roof and in close relation to the Huntington Hospital. By this means a saving of waste energy and an opportunity for co-operative and co-ordinated effort is provided, toward which the Cancer Commission has long aspired.

The speakers at the opening exercises, which will be held on Monday afternoon at 4 o'clock in the amphitheatre of Building D at the Medical School, will be Dr. Henry P. Walcott, chairman of the Cancer Commission, Dr. D. L. Edsall, dean of the Medical School, and Dr. F. C. Wood, director of the Cancer Institute at Columbia University. After the exercises the new building will be open for inspection.