STRAY THOUGHTS ABOUT CANCER, AIDS AND CHEMOTHERAPY


David Baltimore, the path breaking American biologist and coreceipient of the 1975 Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine was on a lecture tour of India during Jan 14 -18, 2008. David Baltimore was instrumental in providing the evidence for the conversion of RNA into DNA. Reverse Transcriptase which brings about this synthesis provided the key to the understanding of many retrovirus including HIV virus.

This article is mainly to throw light on the fact that cancer could be viral. I would venture to say that cancer is viral – but the never ending controversies would ensue. Oncologist says that cancer and AIDS are two sides of the same coin. And that is why they treat cancer and AIDS with chemotherapy. AZT the base material of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) is nothing but chemotherapy and this is being administered to HIV/AIDS patients from 1985. AZT stands for Azidothymidine and is often marketed under the names Zidovidine, Retrovir etc.

The German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, addressed Robert Koch in 1905 at a reception in honor of his Nobel Prize: “My dear Professor, now you must get the cancer bug”. Despite the imperial encouragement, the cancer microbiology remained wanting. Bacteria, fungii and other microorganisms were isolated and proposed as candidates. But none could be proved as the cancer bug.

Payton Rous, a virologist, who worked at New York’s Rockofeller Institute, made a dramatic finding. When a farmer brought him a chicken with a large, well developed solid tumor, Rous discovered that some filterable virus from the bird produced amazingly rapid tumors in other chickens within weeks or even days of infection. The Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV) is a retrovirus. “The hall mark of retrovirus is not to kill the cell it infects. As such they are potential carcinogens”.

In the Japanese island of Kyushu as well as in certain parts of Africa and among Caribbean people a number of patients were spotted with leukemia. It is in the blood of these patients that “spreading” retrovirus was spotted. Robert Gallo the scientist who found HIV/AIDS virus later named this leukemia retrovirus, HTLV – Human T Cells Leukemia Virus. This happened in 1981 – 3 years prior to the find of the actual AIDS virus by the same scientist.

When Gallo found the first retrovirus in human being (till then it was thought retrovirus could be the monopoly of the animal kingdom) in 1981, scientists said “if the HTLV retrovirus produced in certain rare leukemias cause the anarchic multiplication of white cells, it was easy to imagine that a very subtle genetic modification in the virus might conversely bring about, as in AIDS cases, the death of those same infected lymphocytes. It was a seductive piece of deduction”. To make it more clear, in AIDS patients WBC is decreased and in leukemia patients WBC is increased. In other words, the action of retrovirus in both these cases is on WBC. That is why Gallo inferred that these should be the same virus with a genetic variation.

Next to Payton Rous’ findings that tumor could be a viral infection, Gallo’s finding that leukemia is viral leads us to think that cancers should be viral. And till date there is no indication that it could be due to some other unknown microorganisms.

The dissenting scientists argue that Koch’s postulates enunciated in 1884 does not establish that cancer is viral. According to Robert Koch a microbe guilty of causing a disease should have these three qualities.
1. First, the germ must be found growing abundantly in every patient and every diseased tissue.
2. Second, the germ must be isolated and grown in the laboratory.

3. Third, the purified germ must cause the disease in another host.

Some stray thoughts about the cause of cancer: After atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the population there developed mainly cancer. The majority of death in these two cities are even now recorded as due to cancer. Here my assumption is the microorganisms in and around that area have been converted into cancer causing viruses due to radiation.

Hepatitis B is a virus – scientists say that causes liver cancer or cancer elsewhere in the body. Hepatitis C causes liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Hope every scientist would agree that these are viral beyond doubt.
Scientists say that Papilloma virus cause breast cancer, uterus cancer and cancer elsewhere!

Our grandmothers used to say that curd should never be mixed with hot rice and if it is consumed as such, it could cause jaundice. Jaundice is mostly caused by virus. The bacteria in curd could possibly get converted into virus due to heat and this could be the reason for jaundice. Now the argument is that jaundice is a symptom and not a disease and let us ignore this as grandmothers’ talk.

When so much is said about cancer – virus connection even in the scientific world, why shy away from announcing that cancer is a viral disease. Probably multinational companies stand in the way – because how could they then sell chemotherapy for cancer. Why not? They sell chemotherapy for AIDS!!