824
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION
Opportunities. Lord Moynihan, former president of the Royal College of Surgeons. recently remarked, in addressing the British Medical Association, that Lord Lister w a s the greatest material benefactor the world has ever known and that he had "saved more lives than all the wars of all the ages have thrown away." The speaker might havc also remarked that these marvelous results were obtained by the use of a chemical compound (phenol) already long known to chemists. The speaker would probably have also been justified in remarking that the introduction of surgical anesthesia had brought relief from more pain than had been inflicted in all the wars of all the ages. Here again this result followed the use of a chemical compound (ether) well known to chemists for 300 years before the medical profession learned to use it as an anesthetic. Numerous other illustrations of this kind could he cited: the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, boasts of having cured more than 10,000,000 human beings of the hookworm disease largely through the use of another compound, carbon tetrachloride, already known t o chemists for almost a century before health officials learned from a veterinarian its value. Malaria may be cured or prevented by quinine, syphilis and yaws by mercury and arsenic, amebic dysentery by emetine: every form of pain-from the mildest headache t o the agonizing pain of angina pectoris-every farm of convulsions (epilepsy, tetanus) may now be relieved hv chemical com~ounds. Most of these advances have resulted from the pharmacological investigation of a oless s than 10.000 of themore than260.000 organiccompounds known to chemists: .~ e r h. . what advances might result from even a superficial study of the other 250,000 compounds no one could predict. Of course, theoretically, i t is the function of the medical schools and the richly endowed medical research institutes to investigate the possibilities in this field, hut experience has shown that the medical profession is so engrossed in the problems of the individual patient that there is little time for pioneer exploratory work. Hence clear leads for the possible chemical control of one of the present greatest scourges of mankind (cancer) are not being followed up; in fact, eminent "authorities" on cancer recently demonstrated (to their own satisfaction) that any control of cancer through drugs is impossible just as the most eminent surgeons two or three years before the introduction of surgical anesthesia by ether had demonstrated (to their own satisfaction) that the hope of finding a drug which would produce this effect was a "chimera." Illogical as i t is, i t may he necessary for the chemists t o take the lead in this fieldjust as they did in showing the practical dyers the possibilities in the aniline dyes. the photographers the possibilities in the use of synthetic developers, etc. The time may come when there will be attached t o every chemical factory and every chemical research laboratory, a pharmacological laboratory, the function of which will be the investigation of the therapeutic possibilities of the chemical compounds discovered. The dry cleanser or the manufacturer of a fire extinguisher a few years ago would probably have been greatly surprised to learn that he was daily using a compound which was destined soon to restore to health and useful activity 10,000,000 sick human beings. In any care, the quarter of a million of chemical compounds known which have never been tested for medical properties-and about twenty new ones are being added t o the list every day-offer wonderful opportunities for the realization of the day when the human hody, like a famous vehicle, will go to pieces. "All a t once, and nothing first. Just as bubbles do when they burst."-Rsm HUNT,The Nucleus, 8, 3 2 4 (Nov., 1930).
