@ By TED ARMITAGE

.

~ Smoking
one.
lung —
cancer

f= British Medical. Research

Council has before it an offer
from tobacco companies to give
$700,000 for lung cancer research.

-The companies have cause to
be worried. Recently Britain’s
chain-smoking minister of health,
Tan Macleod solemnly warned
young people against “the risks
apparently attendant on excessive
smoking.”

Himself lighting cigarette after .
cigarette from stubs, Macleod told
a press conference on “smoking
and cancer of the lung” that “it
can be taken as established that
a relationship between smoking
and cancer exists.”

“The risk of contracting the

disease appears,” he added, “to
increase with the amount smoked,
particularly of cigarettes.”
. ;
Later, in an _ interview, Dr.
Richard Doll, member of the
Statistical Research Unit of the
Medical Research Council which
produced the report behind the
minister’s statement, had this to
say: ,
“You can tell your readers that
if they smoke 25 cigarettes every
day from the age of 20, I give
them one chance im ten of dying
from lung cancer.

“Lung cancer was once rare.
About 1930 it became commoner,
and in the 1940s it increased at a
tremendous rate. It now kills
15,000 a year in Britain—twice
as many as TB—and it is still in-
creasing. It is the commonest
eancer and kills one in 20: of
* males of all ages. The figure for
females are much lower — only
one in 100. -

“In 1947 the British Medica
Research Council set up a com-
mittee to find out why it was in-
creasing so alarmingly. Obvious-
ly some change must have taken
place. Professor Bradford Hill
and I were given the job.

‘During the last 20 years medi-
cine has made great advances in
the treatment of chest ailments,
and at one time some doctors
said that more exact diagnosis
of these was responsible for the
whole increase in diagnosis of
lung cancer. No one _ believes
that now. ;

“We looked into atmospheric
pollution, exhaust fumes, indus-
trial processes, road dust and
tobacco habits.

“We have interviewed 1,500
people with lung cancer in Lon-
don, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol,
and Cambridge, and controlled
the inquiry by interviewing 3,000
other people who were not suffer-
ing from this disease.

‘“The figures left us in little
doubt. There is a close associa-

His reply was:

“That’s about it. When you
take the historical background it’s
clear enough. Lung cancer was
once rare. The actual increase
in- smoking in modern times is
small. Cigarettes appeared about
1880 and climbed to popularity
in the First World War.

“Today’s victims of lung cancer
began smoking about that time
or a little later, for the disease

. takes a long time to develop.

“It would seem that we can
expect further increases in the
future, to go by the striking in-
crease in smoking during the
Second World War.

“Women are recent smokers,
and we think that is why their
figures are lower than the men’s.
’ “But if we all stopped smoking
tomorrow there would probably
be little improvement in the cas-
ualty figures for another 20 years.

“That brings us to the other—
industrial causes of lung cancer.
Nickel refining and asbestos pro-
cessing are dangerous but may

QN March 14, at a quarter to
three in the afternoon, the
‘greatest living thinker ceased to
think.
~ He had been left alone for
scarcely two minutes, and when
we came back we found him in
an armchair, peacefully gone to
sleep — but forever. ;

An immeasurable loss has been
sustained both by the militant
proletariat of Europe and Am-
erica and by historical science in
the death of this man.

The gap that has been left by
the death of this mighty spirit
will soon enough make itself felt.

Just as Darwin discovered the

law of evolution in organic na-
ture, so Marx discovered the law
of evolution in human history.
He discovered the simple fact,
hitherto concealed by an over-

growth of ideology, that mankind >

tion between cigarette smoking must first of all eat and drink,

and lung cancer.
“We are not alone in the world.
Wynder and Graham have ob-

tained much the same results in ©

have shelter and clothing, before
it can pursue politics, science, re-
ligion, art, etc. /

And that therefore the produc-

the United States. So have other tion of the immediate material

investigators in Holland, Germ-
any and Finland:” ~
@

The question was put to Dr.
Doll, “So you would say that

means of subsistence, and conse-
quently the degree of economic
development attained by a given
people or during a given epoch,
form the foundation upon which

the results show the closest rela- ‘the state institutions, the legal

tion between cigarettes and lung
cancer?” ee

conceptions, the art and even the
religious ideas of the people con-

.to been the case.

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now be adequately controlled.
Coal-gas and chromate workers
may be in need of protection, too.
And it is important for-us to
make sure there is no risk in
other trades, such as the foundry
workers.

5

March 17,

cerned have been evolved, and in
the light of which these things
must therefore be explained, in-
stead of vice versa as had hither-

But that is not all. Marx also
discovered the special law of
motion governing the present-day
capitalist mode of production and

the bourgeois society that this
Mode of production has created.

The discovery of surplus value

suddenly threw light on the prob- —

Jem in trying to solve which all
Previous investigators, both
bourgeois economists and social-
ist critics, had been groping in
the dark. —

Two such discoveries would be
enough for one lifetime. ._Happy
the man to whom it is granted to
make even one such discovery.

But in every single field which
Marx investigated — and he in-
vestigated very many fields, none
of them superficially — in every
field, even in that of mathemat-
ics, he’ made independent discov-
eries, : ;

Such was the man of science.
But this was not even half the
man. fh

Science was for Marx a histori-
cally dynamic revolutionary force.

However great the joy with
which he welcomed a new dis-
covery in some theoretical sci-
ence whose practical application

Lt | eras |

_ [CONSOLIDATED]
TRUST BANK

“Why don’t they all smoke cigars?” —

“We are going on with our
research and shall publish our
findings from time to time. Wyn-
der, Graham and Croninger, in
the U.S., have produced cancer
in mice by using tobacco tar from
cigarettes.

“This is useful because we have
not. yet found out what makes
cigarettes dangerous. But it will
be found out. This is a changing
world, and man, who does the

changing, will also control the
changes. It is his nature.”

At the grave
of Karl Marx -

This Sunday, March 14, is the 71st anniversary of the death
of Karl Marx. And this speech, made by his great friend and co-
worker, Frederick Engels, at the cemetery in Highgate, London, where
Marx is buried, rings even more true than when it was delivered on

1883, for it has been proven by the years.

perhaps it was as yet quite im-
possible ‘to envisage, he- experi-
enced quite another kind of joy
‘when the discovery involved im-
mediate revolutionary changes in
industry and in the general course
of history.
. For example, he followed close-
ly the development of the discoy-
eries made in the field of elec-
tricity and recently those of
Marcel Deprez.*

For Marx was before all else a
‘revolutionary.

His real mission in life was to
contribute-in one way or another

_to the overthrow of capitalist

society and of the state institu-

‘tions which it had brought into

being, to contribute to the libera-
tion of the present-day proletar-

‘iat, which he was the first to

make conscious of its own ‘posi-
tion and its needs, of the condi-
tion under which it could win
emancipation. aoe
_ Fighting was his element. And
he fought with a passion, a ten-
acity and a success such as few
could rival. _

His work on the first Rhein-
ische Zeitung (1842), the Paris
Vorwarts (4844); the Brussels
Deutsche Zeitung (1847), the
Neve Rheinische Zeitung (1848-
49), the New York Tribune (1852-
61), and in addition to these a

host of militant pamphlets, -work  fa@ities

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MARCH 12, 1954 — PAGE 8

in revolutionary clubs in Paris,
Brussels and London, and finally,
crowning all, the formation of the |
International: Working Men’s As- |
sociation — this was indeed an
achievement of which its found-
er might well have been proud.

even if he had done nothing else. _

And consequently Marx was the
best hated and most calumniated
man in his time. ,

Governments, both absolutist
and republican, deported him
from their territories. :

The bourgeoisie, whether con-
servative or extreme democrat,
vie with one another in heaping
slanders upon him.

All this he brushed aside as
though it were cobweb, ignoring
it, answering only when neces-
sity compelled him. ; oes

And now he has died—beloved,
revered and mourned by millions

- of revolutionary fellow-workers—
_from the mines of Siberia to Cali-
fornia, in all parts of Europe and
America—and I make bold to say

that though he may have had
many opponents he has: hardly
one personal enemy.

- His name will endure through ©
the ages, and so, also, will his
work. +,

* Marcel ‘Deprez invented a chreno-
graph-instrument for measuring high