Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Nazi-ing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, and the U.S. government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which we’ll get to in the Bonus Facts later.

Moving on to cancer, typically when physicians are looking to find potential paths to cure people of various types of cancer, they’ll use tried and true methods proven to help in the aggregate towards this end. Other times, they’ll use new and experimental procedures that may help, or may do nothing, but generally trying to avoid doing harm. In all cases in most of the developed world, they’ll explain what they are going to do, and then ask for consent from their patient or their guardian or the like before administering any treatment regardless of what it is. But this is a relatively modern idea and in the wild west days of medicine that are just barely in our rearview mirror, few things were off the table, whether a given patient consented to something or not. This is the story of the eventual head of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Chester Southam, and his quest to see what would happen if he injected people, from healthy to terminal, with cancer. Along the way we’ll also be looking at whether it’s possible to catch cancer from another human, the cancers in certain animals that are spread directly via contact, even in one odd case to a human, and give yet another reason why mosquitoes should be eradicated from the Earth.

But before all that, our story today begins in 1963 at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Enter the aforementioned Dr. Chester Southam, who, at the time, was working at the Sloan‐Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. While there, for about a decade, Dr. Southam had been experimenting with injecting people with cancer without their informed consent… He had gotten away with it up to this point. But that was about to end thanks to what happened at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital.

Rewinding a little bit, starting around 1954, Dr. Southam began wondering what would happen if he injected people with the famed HeLa cancer cells, which more or less revolutionized medicine, more on these cells in the Bonus Facts later. He particularly wanted to study the immune system’s response to such.

In his first experiments, he decided to focus on people who already had what was likely terminal cancer, injecting the cancer cells into their skin and then waiting to see what would happen. In this round, the general course of things was for cancerous nodules to form at the injection sites. For most, eventually their immune system would successfully get rid of the nodules on their own, but not for everyone. Southam wrote in his paper on the matter that he had to remove the cancer manually on some, and that for 4 of the patients, the nodules came back multiple times after removal. Unfortunately, in one patient, the HeLa cancer cells managed to spread to her lymph nodes and beyond to join her other cancer in helping her to cease having to deal with the troubles associated with life.

The problem with this experiment, he thought, was that it was on people who already had widespread cancer and compromised immune systems. But what would happen, or how would things be different, if experimenting on healthy individuals? To answer this question, he targeted the staple subjects for all individuals doing questionably ethical research- people who are incarcerated.

In this case, in 1956, he selected about 150 inmates in the Ohio Prison system. Now, it is noted that these individuals allegedly consented to all of this knowing fully what he was doing, although there are conflicting reports on this, and seemingly no hard records backing it up. Whatever the case there, as for what happened when he put HeLa cancer cells all up in their goodies, unlike the previous terminal cancer patients he’d experimented on, all of these healthy individuals’ immune systems were able to get rid of the cancer and, fascinatingly, the more he injected in a given subject vs another, the faster their bodies were able to get rid of it.

In total in all his experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s, around 600 people were injected with HeLa cells. But it wouldn’t be until 1963 he would get in trouble for this and, not coincidentally, experimenting on individuals without informed consent at a Jewish hospital post-WWII was a huge reason why. Whoopsadoodle. Read the room Dr. Southam.

Up to this point, Southam had run the experiment on countless individuals from terminal cancer patients to healthy. But now he wanted to know what would happen if people who were terminally ill from other diseases unrelated to cancer were injected with the HeLa cancer cells.

Thus, he partnered with one Dr. Emanuel Mandel at the Jewish hospital to begin injecting various patients with cancer cells. In this case, it would seem that the otherwise terminal patients were simply told they were being injected with something to test their immune systems, which was technically true. And that they allegedly all gave oral consent to that, at least according to Mandel and Southam.

The problem in this instance, however, was that some of the other physicians at the institution took issue with their already very sick patients being used in such an experiment and without informed consent, including eventual whistleblowers Drs David Leichter, Perry Ferkso, and Avir Kagan- all of whom resigned their positions over it as well. Noteworthy, the three doctors in question were Jewish, and, as alluded to, with WWII barely in the rear view mirror and the establishment of the Nuremberg Code for Permissible Human Experiments, let’s just say they were pissed.

If you’re wondering about the Nuremberg Code, it was a rather revolutionary concept for physicians at the time, and outlines in part, “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision…”

Dr. Southam seemingly disagreed, arguing that “It is not necessary to present [the subject] with what you feel are inconsequential data and [it is] unethical to ram down his throat information which is detrimental to his condition.”

In other words, the fact that he was injecting them with cancer was inconsequential in his opinion because he didn’t expect any negative long term result, and if he told them, it would only stress them out, thereby being a negative in their current condition and even potentially changing the results of his experiment slightly in that he was specifically targeting studying the immune system’s response to foreign cancer cells.

Ultimately the three physicians who protested reported it to the NYS Board of Regents, as well as a lawyer, one William Hyman, a board member at the hospital.

Hyman would later state of Drs Mandel and Southam and their work here, “I don’t want Nazi practices of using human beings as experimental guinea pigs.”

Then Attorney General of New York Louis Lefkowitz soon after called for the suspending of Dr. Southams’ medical license, writing, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body. These patients then had a right to know the contents of the syringe: and if this knowledge was to cause fear and anxiety or make them frightened, they had a right to be fearful and frightened and thus say NO to the experiment.”

Other hospital administrators, however, defended the research. Initially claiming that the patients had given oral consent, though this was later refuted owing to never being told about the cancer element. But even still, executive director of the hospital, Solomon Siegel, stated he felt it didn’t matter, “It was not necessary to tell them that the substances were cancer cells because they are harmless. As expected, they were rejected by the patients’ bodies. It was the rate of rejection that was sought.”

Of course, this glosses over the fact that previous immunocompromised individuals Southam experimented on like these terminal patients hadn’t always rejected the cancer so readily, and in one it had successfully spread in her body to join her other cancer as cancer besties. And, of course, the greater issue wasn’t just the cancer aspect or safety or not of it. It was an experiment being done on patients without their giving informed consent to have it done on them.

In the end here, Dr. Southam was found guilty of unprofessional conduct, fraud, and deceit by the NYS Board of Regents. His punishment was to have his medical license revoked for just one year, after which, a mere two years later, he was elected as the President of the American Cancer Society… Yep.

This all brings us to the question of whether or not it’s possible to catch cancer from someone else.

It turns out, contrary to popular belief, yes. Although exceptionally rare, in humans at least.

For example, consider the case of an unnamed 53 year old surgeon which occurred sometime in the 1990s. The paper covering the case notes said surgeon operated on a likewise unnamed 32 year old patient to removed an abdominal tumor. While doing this, the surgeon accidentally cut his own hand. For reasons having nothing to do with potentially getting cancer, the cut was immediately disinfected. Nonetheless, five months later, the surgeon had a lovely tumor on his hand in the very spot he’d been injured during that operation. When said tumor was removed and analyzed, it was found to have been made up of cells from the now deceased former patient of the surgeon’s. A part of him had temporarily lived on in another host. And more importantly as we’ll get into later, had successfully masked itself from the surgeon’s immune system.

In a similar type event, this one in 1986, a lab technician was injecting colon cancer cells into mice and accidentally poked herself in the hand with one of the needles. A tumor developed on the site a couple weeks later and was removed without incident.

Moving on from there, while it is rare thanks to the placenta’s extreme ability to prevent various potentially harmful things access to a growing baby, it turns out certain kinds of cancer, in particular leukemia/lymphomas and melanoma have been found to be able to make the leap from mother to baby. And another exceptionally rare one is twin to twin spreading of cancer in the womb in the case of leukemia. In yet another case, cancer of the placenta, choriocarcinoma, can spread to both the mother and baby.

Moving on from there, in 2007 four rather unlucky people got some organs from an elderly woman who’d died of a stroke. When her liver, lungs, and kidneys found their way into people in need of them, all four of the patients got cancer not long after, with three of them dying of it. Later analysis showed the cancer cells came from the organ donor, who had unknowingly had breast cancer when she died of a stroke.

Up next, in perhaps the most bizarre case, this one occurring in 2014, a Colombian man was having some rather curious health issues and went to the hospital to see what was wrong. Upon investigation, tumors were found in his lungs, liver, and adrenal glands. The problem was, as stated by one of the physicians analyzing the tumor cells, Dr. Atis Muehlenbachs, “It looked like cancer, but the tumors were composed of cells that were not human.”

Eventually they tracked down that the DNA was from a tapeworm- meaning a tapeworm’s cancer had successfully spread throughout its host. Unfortunately for the man, at that point it was too late. You see, he also had HIV, which while fully treatable, with people infected with HIV nowadays living rather normal lifespans if they keep up on their medication, the combination of HIV and some bizarre form of cancer doctors couldn’t identify resulted in him giving up hope of living and refusing all treatment in the weeks leading up to the source of the cancer finally being discovered.

Speaking of non-humans and transmittable cancers, in the early 1990s a rather odd disease popped up among Tasmanian devils, manifesting in tumor growths on their faces and mouths. This aptly named Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease quickly spread from devil to devil and today over 95% of the entire species will ultimately find themselves infected at some point in their lives.

What makes this particular disease so interesting is that once it was studied in detail, it turned out it was not caused by some more common pathogen like a microbe or virus that then in turn induces cancer in the host. Rather, the cancerous cells themselves were being transplanted and growing in and on the new host. If that didn’t make the Tasmanian devils unlucky enough, bizarrely, in 2014 a second, distinct strain of the cancer developed and is now also being transmitted.

As for the means of transmission, this is via the Tasmanian devils fighting and mating with one another, with the cancer cells transmitting through biting in the process of these two activities.

Once in the other devil’s body, the cells continue to replicate and ultimately usually kill the host within 6 months. This occurs via the devil either dying from the spread of the cancer and failure of organs, or ceasing to be able to eat due to the size of the growths around their mouths and face, even sometimes with the tumors pushing out their teeth or resulting in fractures in their jaw bones.

That said, some devils are more resistant to the tumor than others, with some infected relatively recently found to now be able to live up to 2 years. Because those more resistant then have more time to breed, this has resulted in more Tasmanian devils resistant to the cancer being born- a bit of rapid evolution in action, taking only about ten generations of the devils to manifest. In fact, not only have the devil population’s decline started to stabilize in the last few years, but there have even been a couple dozen cases where a given devil has been observed to make a full recovery after their bodies successfully fought off the disease.

Moving over to our canine friends, the oldest known single-cell lineage still replicating away are the cells that cause a disease known as Canine transmissible venereal tumors. The first of these tumorous cells replicated some 11,000 years ago, and actually diverged from canids somewhere around 6,000 years ago- meaning today the cell line has more or less evolved into something of a unicellular organism in its own right, with only 57-64 chromosomes instead of the normal 78 found in dogs.

As to the transmission, this is almost always transmitted sexually, with the tumor cells infecting the male dog’s Mr. Happy and the female dog’s outer Mrs. Happy covering. That said, given dogs’ propensity to lick and sniff these areas before and after putting on some Marvin Gaye and shampooing the wookie, it has been observed to infect their noses and mouths as well.

Now, at this point you might be wondering- if this is technically possible, even in humans, why isn’t this something seemingly ever discussed as a risk-factor when around someone with cancer?

To begin with, in order for cancer to transmit from one person to another, you’re going to need to get the offending cells from the one person’s body into the other in a way in which the cell can survive the initial transplantation and then have what it needs to keep replicating.

Let’s say that did happen and the cells get into the other person’s body by some miracle, perhaps when taking a cancerous bald-headed gnome for a stroll in the misty forest, or in cases like the aforementioned surgeon who cut his hand. The problem for the cancer here is that in virtually all cases, as happened in almost all of Dr. Southam’s experiments, the new host’s immune system is going to recognize the foreign invader and kill it off promptly.

Also as seen to an extent in Dr. Southam’s experiments and some of the aforementioned examples, exceptions occur in instances where the person’s immune system was extremely compromised, such as from AIDS or individuals taking immunosuppressant drugs. Demonstrating this, this is how one of the four aforementioned organ transplant patients survived the breast cancer he got from the original organ owner. Unlike the other three who died as a result, in his case, removal of the donated organ was not immediately life threatening. Thus, the doctors simply removed the cancerous kidney and then he was able to stop taking the immunosuppressant drugs, making it extremely likely his immune system would eradicate the cancer cells. Just in case, they also treated him for the cancer directly. One or both of the methods worked swimmingly and he was cancer free not long after and ready for a new transplant that wasn’t so troublesome.

Of course, the more concerning potential exceptions here are cancerous cells in which the cell has mutated in a way that makes its foreign body nature difficult or impossible for your immune system to detect. This did not happen with the HeLa cancer cells Dr. Southam used, but fully possible with other cells, or even a mutated version of the HeLa cells as can happen.

This is seemingly what happened with the aforementioned surgeon with the tumor on his hand. You see, in order to find out why his body had not simply gotten rid of the foreign tumor naturally, he was examined to see if he had any immune deficiencies. The results of the tests didn’t find any such issue, meaning the tumor cells themselves seem to have successfully masked their presence from his immune system somehow. Thus, they were fully capable of successfully spreading from human to human if given a pathway.

This is also what is happening, for example, in the cases of the canine sexually transmitted tumors, as well as with the Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. In the latter, normally their immune systems would use the Major Histocompatibility Complex- a group of proteins on the surface of most cells- to see that the cells are foreign bodies. But in the case of these particular tumor cells, they don’t have an MHC, leading researchers to conclude this is probably why they aren’t being detected and eradicated in the vast majority of cases up until more recent times where this is starting to happen as noted.

All that said, fear not. This sort of thing is not generally considered a concern for humans, even though there have been known cancerous cells that can infect and successfully establish themselves in a new host. This is primarily because, first, unlike Tasmanian devils, we aren’t going around biting one another randomly, or when mating… or at least most of us aren’t. We aren’t here to judge. You do you, so long as informed consent is given.

Thus, the extremely low odds of the cancerous cells being transmitted successfully from one host to another, combined with the also extremely low odds of your immune system being unable to eradicate the problem if it by some miracle actually happens, have to date resulted in it never being a problem for humans in general. And even in the future with cases of a potential STD version, similar to what’s been going around in dogs for thousands of years, humans have things like condoms and widespread semi-monogamous or fully monogamous relationships that would limit the initial spread to some extent, requiring a bit of a perfect storm of unlikely events to see such a cancer establish itself widely.

That said, it is always possible, and perhaps more concerning is the case of Syrian hamsters, where such a strain of cancerous cells is actually capable of being transmitted from hamster to hamster via arguably the most hated and already deadly creature of all- mosquitoes.

Going back to humans, mosquitoes transmit a host of other diseases as well, all giving rise to the Mosquito Cocktail Hypothesis for cancer. Noteworthy on this one, there are five viruses, one microbe, three parasites and one additional virus in HIV that all have been definitively shown to have a causal relationship with cancer, in the case of HIV via suppressing your immune system. But countless other viruses, microbes, and parasites have been loosely linked in various ways to cancer. For example, versions of the human papillomavirus (HPV) occasionally result in cancer in the host, killing literally hundreds of thousands of people annually. H. pylori, which causes ulcers, can cause chronic inflammation which in some cases may lead to cancer, with many other viruses, microbes, and parasites likewise also being able to do a similar thing, some 27 of which to date have been found in mosquitoes. As researchers at the Experimental Dermatology Unit at the Karolinska Institute note in their paper “Does the mosquito have more of a role in certain cancers than is currently appreciated?”

“There are over 3000 species of mosquito and very few have been fully analysed, so the six remaining infectious agents may be present in some unexamined species. This hypothesis proposes that more cancers than are presently appreciated may arise from the long-term outcome of a mosquito bite, which by releasing a complex cocktail of up to 60 infectious agents directly into the blood stream, often results in contemporaneous immuno-suppression and a multiplicity of co-infections. These co-infections may act synergistically in whole, or in part, and in complex ways. Whether and if so which type of cancer ensues will depend on the constituent ingredients in the cocktail, determined by multiple factors such as the mosquito’s drinking and feeding patterns, number of previous blood-meals and the variety of intermediate hosts from which these meals are taken. Only a few mosquito species carry malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya and the other recognised serious human ailments. This hypothesis suggests that the number of species carrying the cancer cocktail will be few in number but collectively have a worldwide presence.”

While it is just a hypothesis at this stage, I think we can all agree on the strength of the already known 1 million or so humans every year killed by mosquitoes and their disease spreading abilities, it’s time to make the mosquito come to fear our extinctive powers. Seriously people. We focus on eradicating countless diseases with vaccines and other herculean efforts to save sometimes massively fewer lives per year, and we shut the world down to save a not too dissimilar number of lives per year during COVID. Mass murder of our little itchy friends would be a drop in the bucket, but save a million people per year at least. Further, it would only be necessary to wipe out about 1/30th of the species of mosquitoes, leaving the rest to happily continue being pollinators and food sources for other animals. Humans are remarkably adept at wiping out species from the earth when we aren’t even trying. It’s time to combine these two things and eradicate the troublesome species of mosquito from our little spaceship called Earth.

Bonus Facts:

Going back to the HeLa cancer cells, by the mid-1960s dozens of immortal cell lines had joined HeLa in the arsenal of medical research, bearing donor-derived names such as A-Fi and Di-Re. These lines had opened an unprecedented window into carcinogenesis, allowing researchers to pinpoint the exact moment a cell changed from normal to cancerous, a process dubbed spontaneous transformation. Researchers in Russia even claimed to have discovered a virus that caused cancer, bringing the possibility of a universal cure tantalizingly within reach. Then, in September 1966, molecular biologist Stanley Gartler of the American Type Culture Collection Committee stood before the Second Decennial Review Conference on Cell Tissue and Organ Culture in Bedford Pennsylvania and dropped a massive bombshell. While conducting an audit of immortal cell lines, Gartler discovered that despite being of supposedly separate origins, all 18 lines he examined contained the same mutation of a gene called G6PD found almost exclusively in people of African-American descent. To his shock, Gartler realized these weren’t new cell lines at all; they were all HeLa. Alarmed, Gartler tested more and more cell lines, but in every case he found only HeLa. The conclusion was disturbing but inescapable: there were no other immortal cell lines. There was only HeLa. So vigorous were Henrietta Lacks’s cells that if even one made its way into a cell culture it would out-divide and replace the original cells overnight. Like a virus HeLa had hopped from laboratory to laboratory and culture to culture, invading and conquering until there was nothing else left.

Every jaw in the conference hall must have dropped at once, for at a stroke Gartler had shattered over a decade of scientific progress – and with it countless hopes, dreams, and careers. All other commercial human cell lines were now worthless. There was no spontaneous transformation or cancer virus; the cultures had simply been contaminated with HeLa. Hopes of understanding carcinogenesis and developing a universal cure quickly faded away. Eventually new authentic human cell lines would be discovered, including A549 in 1972 and HEK 293 in 1973, but never again at the same feverish pace as the “golden years” of 1951-1966.

70 years on Henrietta’s remarkable cells are still one of the most popular human cell lines in medical research, with an estimated 50 million tons stored in laboratory freezers around the world. If laid end-to-end, they would circle the globe three times. And so long as they are kept properly fed and incubated they will continue to divide and thrive for decades to come, outliving their original host by a century or more.

Going back to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, this was a program that ran for about four decades in Macon County, Alabama during the mid-20th century.

In this one, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) approached the Tuskegee Institute (located in Macon County which had the highest rate of syphilis among African-American males) about forming a research group in order to study the effects of untreated syphilis on a black male population for a duration of six to nine months and then follow-up with a treatment plan. The Institute agreed, along with the head of the University’s hospital Dr. Eugene Dibble, and was complacent through the first year, thinking treatment was the ultimate goal. Later, they would claim they were deceived themselves and just as much victimized as the men in the study.

The study, during the first year, was led by Dr. Taliafero Clark. The PHS enrolled six hundred Macon County men, 399 with syphilis and 201 who weren’t infected, to be part of the study. None of the men actually knew what the study was for. They were lured in with the promise of “free health care,” something that none of them had, and treatment of “bad blood,” a general localized term that encompassed several different afflictions, including anemia, fatigue, and other venereal diseases.

The men were told that they were going to get free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. It was said that the reason for the deception was that it would be the only way the men would stay in the study and the researchers wanted to closely observe the course of the disease over a large sample-size to see the effects as the disease progressed, even to death. But not to worry, as long as the ones that died allowed autopsies to be performed, their funeral expenses were covered…

Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr was the on-site director of the study. He actually supported partial treatment for the men for the sole purpose of making sure they remained in the study (as in, stayed alive). He was the one who gained “consent” of the men for painful spinal taps by framing them as a “special free treatment.” In letters he sent to the men with the header from the Macon County Health Department, it read,

“You will now be given a last chance for a second examination. This examination is a very special one and after it is finished you will be given a special treatment if it is believed you are in condition to stand it.”

The study, originally only intended to go nine months, went beyond a year and then, due to breakthroughs, extended. In 1934, two years after the study began, the first major medical paper was published detailing health effects on untreated syphilis. By 1936, according to the CDC, a medical paper was published criticizing the treatment plan for the men. 1940, once again according to the CDC, brought efforts “to hinder the men (in the study) from getting treatment ordered under the military draft effort.” You see, about 250 of them had registered for the draft and been found to have syphilis and ordered to be treated with penicillin.

Despite this, the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment were never administered nor offered penicillin as treatment. The study administrators wanted to watch the progression of the disease as the men got sick and, in many cases, died during the forty years the study went on even though for much of it a relatively effective treatment was available. All total it’s estimated that 128 of the men died either directly from syphilis or complications related to it, 40 infected their wives (and in some cases possibly others), and there were 19 of the men’s children born with congenital syphilis.

Finally, on July 25, 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the story that uncovered the truth about the study. A government panel ruled that the study was “ethically unjustified” and it ended. In the summer of 1973, attorney Fred Grey filed a class-action suit on behalf of the men against the PHS and it ended with nine million dollars (about fifty million dollars today) being handed out to the surviving participants and families as settlement.

In a similar study, this time to test penicillin’s effectiveness in treating syphilis and other STDs, researchers led by Dr. John Charles Cutler from the United States (funded by the Public Health Services, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health) headed to Guatemala in 1946 and found prostitutes who had syphilis, getting them to then give it to unsuspecting Guatemalan soldiers, mental health patients, and prisoners. They also directly infected certain individuals by, to quote, “…direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded … or in a few cases through spinal punctures.” It isn’t known how many people died as a result of this as the results from the study were never published.

Dr. John Cutler was also involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He faced no consequences for the numerous people that died in his experiments, and he even led an illustrious and celebrated career including at one point becoming an assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General. As ever, the past was the worst.