University's Chemists Try Mustard Gas to Wipe Out Cancer Growths

Like every other chemistry department, Harvard's test-tube scientists spend a lot of time trying to stamp out cancer,

In the basement of Converse Lab, two research fellows have brewed about 50 concoctions which they hoped would kill timorous cells. Here's one of their recipes:

Poisonous mustard gas.

A cancer-producing crystal.

Join chemically and inject into rat.

The idea was that the crystal would lead the gas to the cancer, which the gas would then destroy. It didn't work. But Orrie M. Friedman and George Wolf --who have been doing these experiments for three years--may have luck with their newest chemical: phosphoric acid esters.

Mustard Chops Off

These compounds contain mustard gas, deadly to all human cells. Normal cells have an enzyme that chops off the mustard gas and takes away its sting. Cancerous cells don't have the enzyme, and the gas hits them with full force.

The tough part is getting the esters in pure form. It takes long hours of work to construct the ester molecule, and when it's finally finished there are a lot of chemicals mixed in that nobody wants. When Friedman and Wolf find out how to get rid of them, they'll be ready for the crucial mouse-test.

In another chemistry lab, Assistant Professor Gilbert J. Stork is also building large molecules. Using test tubes and Florence flasks, Stork makes substances like quinine and morphine that one were obtained only by expeditions to tropical jungles.

Assistant Professor Paul M. Doty works on the biggest molecules of them all, proteins--huge, rambling networks that often contain over 50,000 atoms. Doty studies how they react and interact, and his experiments lead close to the question of the nature of life.

In the Chemistry Department, everybody works on an individual project, and often on several projects at once. A University brochure lists 34 fields now under scrutiny, with names like "catalytic hydrogenation" and "electrometric titrations."

The Department has no large-scale project, like the physicists' cyclotron, although it does most of its work in organic chemistry. Two of the more intelligible research jobs are those of Professor George B. Kistiakowski and Assistant Professor Leonard K. Nash.

This is the second in a series of articles on Harvard's scientists and what they are doing.

Kistiakowski spends his time watching gases explode. He seeks to find out why they explode, how fast they explode, and what makes them stop exploding.

Nash is a chemical analyst, but the things he analyzes are too small to be seen by human eyes. He is learning how to dissect chemicals in batches so small that 1000-power microscopes are needed to make them out.

Research like this was handy early in the war, when only a millionth of a gram of plutonium was available for study.

Other work centers on capillary tubes and how they affect chemicals; the structure of natural products; and--perhaps the hardest question of all--what holds molecules together?