According to the American Cancer Society, there are eight documented cases of breast cancer found on papyrus dating all the way back to B. Even the term cancer has been around for centuries— Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is widely considered the Father of Medicine, used the words carcinos and carcinoma to describe tumors.
These Greek terms were also used to describe the crab because Hippocrates thought that tumors resembled crabs. Two views of Clara Jacobi, a Dutch woman who had a tumor removed from her neck in Includes text which describes the tumor and its removal. Despite its long history, cancer is often considered a modern disease because its impact on modern society is much more substantial than its impact on previous peoples.
Researchers pursued different theories of the origin of cancer, subjecting their hypotheses to systematic experimentation. A viral cause of cancer in chickens was documented in , and both chemical and physical carcinogens were conclusively identified. Chromosomal abnormalities were also investigated as possible causes of cancer. In , a need to combat rising public fear and ignorance concerning cancer led to two significant events: the publication of the first known article on cancer's warning signs in a popular woman's magazine, and formation of a nationwide organization dedicated to public education on cancer.
Cancer, as a disease, was brought into the light of day. In , the U. Congress made the conquest of cancer a national goal with a unanimous vote to pass the National Cancer Institute Act.
This Act created the National Cancer Institute, which was expected to break new theoretical ground by conducting its own research, promoting research in other institutions and coordinating cancer-related projects and activities.
In , President Richard M. Key events in the United States' national cancer policy legislative history, from to are available here. Since its establishment, fundamental biomedical research supported by the National Cancer Institute has advanced the understanding of cancer.
George Papanicolaou discovers that cervical cancer can be detected by examining cells from the vagina under a microscope. This breakthrough leads to the development of the Pap test, which allows abnormal cervical cells to be detected and removed before they become cancerous.
David H. Patey develops the modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer. This surgical procedure is less disfiguring than the radical mastectomy and eventually replaces it as the standard surgical treatment for breast cancer.
Legislation signed by President Franklin D. Sir Geoffrey Keynes describes the treatment of breast cancer with breast-sparing surgery followed by radiation therapy. After surgery to remove the tumor, long needles containing radium are inserted throughout the affected breast and near the adjacent axillary lymph nodes. Charles Huggins discovers that removing the testicles to lower testosterone production or administering estrogens causes prostate tumors to regress.
Such hormonal manipulation—more commonly known as hormonal therapy—continues to be a mainstay of prostate cancer treatment. Sidney Farber shows that treatment with the antimetabolite drug aminopterin, a derivative of folic acid, induces temporary remissions in children with acute leukemia.
Antimetabolite drugs are structurally similar to chemicals needed for important cellular processes, such as DNA synthesis, and cause cell death by blocking those processes. Nitrogen mustard belongs to a class of drugs called alkylating agents, which kill cells by chemically modifying their DNA. Ernst Wynder, Evarts Graham, and Richard Doll identify cigarette smoking as an important factor in the development of lung cancer. Roy Hertz and Min Chiu Li achieve the first complete cure of a human solid tumor by chemotherapy when they use the drug methotrexate to treat a patient with choriocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the reproductive tissue that mainly affects women.
NCI researchers Emil Frei, Emil Freireich, and James Holland and their colleagues demonstrate that combination chemotherapy with the drugs 6-mercaptopurine and methotrexate can induce partial and complete remissions and prolong survival in children and adults with acute leukemia. Peter Nowell and David Hungerford describe an unusually small chromosome in the cancer cells of patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia CML.
The U. Surgeon General issues a report stating that cigarette smoking is an important health hazard in the United States and that action is required to reduce its harmful effects. EBV is later shown to cause several other cancers, including nasopharyngeal carcinoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, and some gastric stomach cancers.
On December 23, President Richard M. Nixon signs the National Cancer Act, which authorizes the NCI Director to coordinate all activities of the National Cancer Program, establish national cancer research centers, and establish national cancer control programs. Dominique Stehelin, Harold Varmus, J. Michael Bishop, and Peter Vogt discover that the DNA of normal chicken cells contains a gene related to the oncogene cancer-causing gene of avian sarcoma virus, which causes cancer in chickens.
This finding eventually leads to the discovery of human oncogenes. FDA approves tamoxifen, an antiestrogen drug originally developed as a birth control treatment, for the treatment of breast cancer. Tamoxifen represents the first of a class of drugs known as selective estrogen receptor modulators, or SERMs, to be approved for cancer therapy.
The TP53 gene also called p53 , the most commonly mutated gene in human cancer, is discovered. It is a tumor suppressor gene, meaning its protein product p53 protein helps control cell proliferation and suppress tumor growth. DNA from human papillomavirus HPV types 16 and 18 is identified in a large percentage of cervical cancers, establishing a link between infection with these HPV types and cervical carcinogenesis.
Results from an NCI-supported clinical trial show that women with early-stage breast cancer who were treated with breast-conserving surgery lumpectomy followed by whole-breast radiation therapy had similar rates of overall survival and disease-free survival as women who were treated with mastectomy alone.
The human oncogene HER2 also called neu and erbB2 is cloned. The tumor suppressor gene BRCA1 is cloned. Specific inherited mutations in this gene greatly increase the risks of breast and ovarian cancer in women and the risks of several other cancers in both men and women.
The tumor suppressor gene BRCA2 is cloned. Similar to BRCA1, inheriting specific BRCA2 gene mutations greatly increases the risks of breast and ovarian cancer in women and the risks of several other cancers in both men and women.
FDA approves anastrozole for the treatment of estrogen receptor-positive advanced breast cancer in postmenopausal women. Anastrozole is the first aromatase inhibitor a drug that blocks the production of estrogen in the body to be approved for cancer therapy.
FDA approves rituximab, a monoclonal antibody, for use in patients with treatment-resistant, low-grade or follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma NHL. Rituximab is the first monoclonal antibody approved for use in cancer therapy. It is later approved as an initial treatment for these types of NHL, for another type of NHL called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. FDA approves tamoxifen to reduce the incidence of breast cancer in women at increased risk.
FDA approves trastuzumab, a monoclonal antibody that targets cancer cells that overexpress the HER2 gene, for the treatment of women with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. Trastuzumab is later approved for the adjuvant post-operative treatment of women with HER2-positive early-stage breast cancer.
Results of a clinical trial show that the drug imatinib mesylate, which targets a unique protein produced by the Philadelphia chromosome, is effective against chronic myelogenous leukemia CML. Imatinib treatment changes the usually fatal disease into a manageable condition. Later, it is also shown to be effective in the treatment of gastrointestinal stromal tumors GIST.
Results of NCI's Study of Tamoxifen and Raloxifene STAR show that postmenopausal women at increased risk of breast cancer can reduce their risk of developing the disease if they take the antiestrogen drug raloxifene. The risk of serious side effects is lower with raloxifene than with tamoxifen.
Gardasil is the first vaccine approved to prevent cervical cancer. FDA approves sipuleucel-T, a cancer treatment vaccine that is made using a patient's own immune system cells dendritic cells , for the treatment of metastatic prostate cancer that no longer responds to hormonal therapy. A century later the development of anesthesia allowed surgery to flourish and classic cancer operations such as the radical mastectomy were developed.
The 19th century saw the birth of scientific oncology with use of the modern microscope in studying diseased tissues. Rudolf Virchow, often called the founder of cellular pathology, provided the scientific basis for the modern pathologic study of cancer. As Morgagni had linked autopsy findings seen with the unaided eye with the clinical course of illness, so Virchow correlated microscopic pathology to illness.
This method not only allowed a better understanding of the damage cancer had done, but also aided the development of cancer surgery.
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