Cancer Through Time

[Guest guest]

Here is a history on cancer:

2625 BC: The Egyptian surgeon Imhotep describes a case of breast

cancer. Under " therapy, " he lists " there is none. "

440 BC: Greek historian Herodotus writes of a Persian queen, Atossa,

who underwent perhaps the first mastectomy, when she asked Greek slave to cut

out her breast tumor.

400 BC: Hippocrates, the " father of medicine, " coins the term

" karkinos " crab to describe cancer.

160 AD: Greek scientist Galen proposes that cancer is the result of

trapped black bile, a hypothesis that would hold sway until the 17th century.

1761: Hill publishes Cautions on the Immoderate Use of Snuff,

proposing a link between snuff inhaled tobacco and lip cancer.

1775: English surgeon Percival Pott notices a link between chimney

sweeping and scrotal cancer.

1778: English doctor Hunter assigns stages to cancer. For early

cancer, he recommends surgery; for late stages, " remote sympathy. "

1811: English novelist Fanny Burney undergoes a mastectomy without

anesthesia or antisepsis and lives to write about it.

1847: German doctor Rudolf Virchow coins the term " leukemia " to

describe an overgrowth of white cells in the blood.

1860: Austrian monk Gregor Mendel discovers genes units of

inheritance in pea plants.

1867: English doctor ph Lister invents the use of antiseptic

methods in surgery.

1890-1900: American surgeon Halsted invents the " radical "

mastectomy, removing not only the breast, but nearby lymph nodes and muscle.

Some radical mastectomies even removed bone.

1903: Polish scientist Marie Curie wins the first of two Nobel

prizes for her discoveries about radiation.

1913: Berlin surgeon Abraham Salomon uses mammograms to see breast

cancer using X-rays.

1915: American uses fruit flies to demonstrate that

genes are carried on chromosomes

1928: Herman Muller, 's student, uses fruit flies to show that

X-rays increase the rate of mutations.

1929: American biochemist Doisy discovers the female hormone

estrogen, which will later be found to play a major role in breast cancer.

1940-1945: Saul Hertz, at Massachusetts General Hospital, uses

radioactive iodine to kill thyroid cancer cells.

1945: Activist and philanthropist Lasker, the " fairy godmother

of medical research, " takes over the American Society for Cancer Control,

turning it into a fundraising and lobbying machine.

1946: Doctors use variants of mustard gas to kill malignant white

cells.

1947-1948: Boston doctor Sidney Farber uses successfully uses

chemotherapy on children with leukemia, obtaining brief remissions.

1948-1950: American and British researchers link smoking to lung

cancer.

1952-1954: Papanicolaou finds a way to diagnose cervical

cancer, leading the way to screenings that reduce deaths dramatically.

1955: Philip introduces the Marlboro Man, its most successful

smoking icon to date, and sales of the brand shoot up by 5,000%.

1963-1968: Americans Carbone and Vince DeVita treat breast

cancer with chemotherapy after surgery, increasing survival. DeVita and others

go on to cure advanced Hodgkin's disease.

1964: U.S. Surgeon General releases a landmark report on smoking and

lung cancer.

1967: British nurse Cicely Saunders founds the first hospice program

to care for the terminally ill.

1968: St. Jude's Children's Research Center reports a 60%-to-80%

cure rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

1971: President Nixon launches the " War on Cancer " by signing the

National Cancer Act.

1971: Last cigarette commercial is broadcast on TV.

1971: Di-ethyl-stilbestrol, or DES, a drug given to pregnant women

to delay preterm delivery, is found to cause uterine cancer in their daughters.

1973: While examining chronic myeloid leukemia cells, American

scientist Janet Rowley discovers a new gene created by the fusing of chromosomes

9 and 22. This discovery paves the way for the creation of the drug Gleevec.

1976-1980: American scientists Bishop and Harold Varmus

propose that cancer-causing genes are created through the distortion of normal

genes found inside cells.

1977: Doctor Bernard Fisher shows that tamoxifen treatment after

breast cancer surgery increases survival for women with estrogen-sensitive

cancer.

1979-1982: American Weinberg and others isolate

cancer-causing genes from cancer cells.

1981: A landmark study shows that radical mastectomy performed on an

estimated 500,000 women over the past 90 years, offers no benefit to the less

invasive, " simple mastectomy. "

1982-1984: Australian researchers Barry Marshall and Robin Warren

demonstrate that Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium, causes stomach ulcers and

cancer. Marshall helped prove H. pylori's link to ulcers by swallowing a glass

of it.

1988: American scientist Bert Vogelstein proposes that cancer cells

are created as the result of multiple genetic alterations.

1990: -King identifies a genetic region that confers

increased risk for breast cancer. This is eventually found to be the gene BRCA1.

1991 to 2003: Doctors use an unproven and highly toxic combination

of high-dose chemotherapy with bone-marrow transplants to treat breast cancer.

More than 40,000 patients later, research eventually shows the therapy doesn't

save lives.

1998: The Food and Drug Administration approves Herceptin for breast

cancer, the first man-made antibody to treat cancer, widely seen as the

beginning of the new field of " targeted therapies. "

2001: FDA approves Gleevec, a drug based on Rowley's discovery, to

treat chronic myeloid leukemia. Gleevec becomes a new ideal in cancer therapy,

allowing patients to live symptom-free for years without major side effects.

2003: Scientists complete the Human Genome Project, sequencing all

the genes in the human chromosome.

2006-2009: Scientists working on the " cancer genome " sequence nearly

all the genes of multiple samples of breast, colon, ovarian and brain cancers.

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http://tinyurl.com/http-www-usatoday-com-yourli

FYI,

Lottie Duthu