Another biologic character is even more striking and significant. A
couple of years ago it was discovered by Murray and Bashford, of the
English Imperial Cancer Research Commission, that the cells of cancer,
in their swift and irregular reproduction, showed an unexpected
peculiarity. In the simplest form of reproduction, one cell cutting
itself in two to make two new ones, known as mitosis, the change begins
in the nucleus, or kernel. This kernel splits itself up into a series of
threads or loops, known as the chromosomes, half of which go into each
of the daughter cells. When, however, sex is born and a male germ-cell
unites with a female germ-cell to form a new organism, each cell
proceeds, as the first step in the process, to get rid of half of these
chromosomes, so that the new organism has precisely the normal number of
chromosomes, half of which are derived from the father and the other
half from the mother germ-cell. This, by the way, is the mechanical
basis of heredity.

It has been long known that the mitotic processes of cancer and the
forming and dividing of the chromosomes were riotous and irregular, like
the rest of its growth. But it was reserved for these investigators to
discover the extraordinary fact that the majority of dividing and
multiplying cancer-cells had, instead of the normal number of
chromosomes, exactly half the quota. In other words, they had resumed
the powers of the germ, or sexual, cells from which the entire body was
originally built up, and were, like them, capable of an indefinite
amount of multiplication and reproduction. How extraordinary and
limitless this power is may be seen from the fact that a little group of
cancer-cells grafted into a mouse to produce a Jensen tumor, from which
a graft is again taken and transplanted into another mouse, and so on,
is capable, in a comparatively few generations, of producing cancerous
masses a thousand times the weight of the original mouse in which the
tumor started!

In short, cancer-cells are obviously a small, isolated group of the
body-cells, which in a ghastly fashion have found the fountain of
perpetual youth, and can ride through and over the law-abiding citizens
of the body-state with the primitive vigor of the dawn of life.

This brings us to the most practical and important questions of the
problem: What are the influences which condition this isolation and
outlawry of the cells? What can we do to prevent or suppress the
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