In low and middle income countries the main challenges for cancer control are poorer access to cancer screening and treatment and as a consequence presentation at more advances stages, when they are less amenable to cure. Even if the mustard gas accidents of Bari were the pivotal events that launched the research for cancer chemotherapy, nowadays more research must be done not only to encourage individuals to adopt healthy behaviors to prevent cancer, but also to develop more effective screening methods to detect cancer at earlier stages and also to orient national health systems to make affordable and effective cancer treatments available to everybody.
New York: Oxford University Press, pages. Goodman, M. Wintrobe, W. Dameshek, M. Goodman, A. Gilman and M. McLennan, Nitrogen mustard therapy: use of methyl-bis beta-choloethyl amuine hydrochloride abd tris beta-chloroethyl amine hydrochloride for Hodgkin's disease, lymphosarcoma, leukema and certain allied and miscellaneous disorder [landmark article].
JAMA, ; De Vita and E. A History of Cancer Chemotherapy. American Association for Cancer Research, ; Cancer Facts and Figures Planning cancer control in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Lancet, ; The birth of cancer chemotherapy: accident and research.
Unlikely sources for cancer treatment As with many discoveries in science, chance and coincidence have favored innovation in the creation of new medications or treatments.
Research to practice: How the first chemotherapeutic agents were identified The effects of mustard gas on blood cells and bone marrow were first reported by Dr Eward Krumbhaar in after treating exposed patients in France [ 6 ]. His discovery of the Haber-Bosch reaction underpins the green revolution: the Nobel Prize—winning strategy for synthesizing ammonia paved the way for inexpensive fertilizers, with enormous benefits to agriculture. He also helped lay the foundations of 20th-century electrochemistry and physical chemistry.
To some he was a great friend. During his travels he wrote Einstein postcards in rhyme—as he did for many of his close friends—that were often humorous, ironic, or both. Their son, Hermann, discovered his mother in a pool of her own blood, but Haber left the boy soon after for the eastern front to help deploy the chemical weapons he invented.
In such ways Haber often prioritized his intellectual progeny over his biological offspring. It is perhaps no surprise that according to historian Ute Deichmann, years later Hermann and his wife declined an invitation to attend a scientific memorial for Haber.
The father-son relationship never recovered. Haber obeyed, but the two simply could not get along. He deeply identified as a German and used his skills and intelligence to benefit his country in war and in peace. His Nobel Prize gave him fame, and he took pride in his status as a war hero. Yet by the end of his life his country saw him as little more than a dispensable Jew, even though Haber had converted to Christianity as a young man.
In Hitler ordered Jews removed from positions in the civil service. After trying but failing to help many of his Jewish colleagues, Haber stepped down from his founding position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.
He spent the last year of his life wandering around Europe heartbroken—both literally and figuratively. He died in Basel, in , of a heart attack. The German soldier with the worrisome tale was captured by Allied forces in Tunisia on May 11, Yet British intelligence officials doubted the truth of the report and did nothing—a blunder that could have had lethal repercussions for the Allies in World War II. The Nazis also had reconfigured the Dyhernfurth forced-labor camp in present-day Poland to produce thousands of metric tons of tabun.
Although many senior military officers encouraged Hitler to deploy their powerful new chemical weapon, he waffled, likely for two reasons. First, as a victim of gas poisoning during World War I, Hitler recoiled from using chemical poisons on troops—though he had no qualms about deploying poisons on concentration-camp prisoners.
Second, German military intelligence was unsure whether the Allies had also discovered nerve agents since some of the foundational research had been done in England. Any Allied retaliation on German civilians could have been catastrophic.
President Franklin D. Yet the Germans overestimated Allied capabilities: the Allies had no nerve poisons at their disposal. The Germans had only acquired the new family of chemical weapons by serendipity. He was aiming to create an insecticide that would allow Germany to increase its food production. But after Schrader nearly poisoned himself and his lab mates with mere drops of his newly synthesized insecticide, the company realized that tabun was better suited to military applications and forwarded the discovery to German military researchers.
Schrader experienced eye irritation, pupils constricted to pinpoints that dimmed the surrounding world, a runny nose, and shortness of breath. Luckily for him he avoided the next stage of nerve-agent poisoning: intense sweating, stomach cramping, muscle twitching, a loss of consciousness, and asphyxiation. By a team of German military scientists developing tabun had also designed another nerve agent called sarin that was six times more potent than tabun.
The German Nobel laureate Richard Kuhn was called on to help discern why the new poisons were so deadly. He soon discovered that these nerve agents interfere with a critical enzyme, cholinesterase. In the process Kuhn also discovered a third nerve agent: soman. Dyhernfurth prisoners also were forced to travel alongside train shipments of the nerve agents—effectively used as human canaries to detect leaks of the poison gas.
At the end of the war, after two-and-a-half years of production, the factory at Dyhernfurth had produced almost 12, metric tons of tabun. Some 10, tons were loaded into bombs for the Luftwaffe, and another 2, tons were encased in artillery shells. In February , as the Russians marched toward Berlin, the Nazis quickly abandoned the Dyhernfurth factory. Hundreds of forced laborers were transferred by foot and in open wagons to another concentration camp, Mauthausen. Two-thirds of them died from exposure to freezing temperatures.
The Gestapo tracked down the survivors at Mauthausen and killed them to get rid of witnesses. Desperate to prevent the Red Army from capturing nerve-agent know-how, the Luftwaffe tried and failed to destroy the Dyhernfurth factory from the air. British and U. They hunted down German scientists familiar with nerve-agent production and used their know-how to create and stockpile these new weapons. Thus began a chemical arms race that for decades would parallel the nuclear arms race.
I believe it to be rather unlikely that any man in his right mind would have volunteered for such an experiment. On May 6, , Ronald Maddison, a year-old British soldier, agreed to participate in a medical experiment at the Porton Down military research facility. The promised compensation was tempting: a three-day pass and 15 shillings, which Maddison wanted to use to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
The German gas warfare program was headed by Fritz Haber — whose first try for a weapon was chlorine, which he debuted at Ypres in April It can react with water in the lungs to form hydrochloric acid, which is destructive of tissue and can quickly lead to death, or, at least, permanent lung tissue damage and disability.
At lower concentrations, if it does not reach the lungs, per se, it can cause coughing, vomiting, and eye irritation. Chlorine was deadly against unprotected soldiers.
It is estimated over 1, were killed in its first use at Ypres. Its color and odor made it easy to spot, and since chlorine is water-soluble even soldiers without gas masks could minimize its effect by placing water-soaked - even urine-soaked - rags over their mouths and noses. Additionally, releasing the gas in a cloud posed problems, as the British learnt to their detriment when they attempted to use chlorine at Loos. The wind shifted, carrying the gas back onto their own men.
Phosgene is highly toxic, due to its ability to react with proteins in the alveoli of the lungs, disrupting the blood-air barrier, leading to suffocation.
Allied soldiers pose for a picture while wearing their gas masks. Phosgene was much more effective and more deadly than chlorine, though one drawback was that the symptoms could sometimes take up to 48 hours to be manifest.
The minimal immediate effects are lachrymatory. However, subsequently, it causes build-up of fluid in the lungs pulmonary edema , leading to death. In pure liquid form this is colorless, but in WWI impure forms were used, which had a mustard color with an odor reminiscent of garlic or horseradish.
An irritant and a strong vesicant blister-forming agent , it causes chemical burns on contact, with blisters oozing yellow fluid. Initial exposure is symptomless, and by the time skin irritation begins, it is too late to take preventative measures.
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