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SIR ERNEST LAURENCE KENNAWAY FRS, 1881-1958: CHEMICAL CAUSATION OF CANCER THEN AND TODAY* ALEXANDER HADDOW\ Science proceeds by successive answers to questions more and more subtle coming nearer and nearer to the very essence of phenomena. [Pasteur. Etudes sur la Bure] Oersted . . . suddenly saw, by chance you will say, but chance onlyfavours the prepared mind. [Pasteur. Address, 1854] Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: My first and pleasant duty is to extend my thanks to the academic board, to Professor Symington, and to others for their generous invitation to deliver this Fourth Kennaway Memorial Lecture. It is an honour which I very specially value. It is an honour to follow dear Lacassagne [1], Jacques Monod, and Paul Weiss [2] ; and it also gives me the opportunity to do proper and public homage to my illustrious predecessor, Sir Ernest Kennaway (fig. 1). The plan of the lecture is to afford some account of the background to Kennaway's work, to attempt to relate this to one or two outstanding developments in chemical carcinogenesis since his time, and finally to say something of Kennaway the man. Even in his early days Kennaway was a born naturalist, and I must refer the reader to Sir James Cook's account in the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society [3] to learn how Kennaway, even in his *An extension of the Fourth Kennaway Memorial Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution on October 26, 1972 under the chairmanship of Sir James Cook FRS. tPresent address: The Lodge, Pollards Wood, Nightingales Lane, Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks HP8 4SN, England. I do not conceal—and I have no wish to conceal—the pleasure and satisfaction, even the sense of pride and piety, which the preparation of this lecture has given. But it would not have been possible without the greatest assistance from my wife; from Miss A. M. Whitecross (my literary assistant); Miss M. Phillips (my secretary); Messrs. N. P. Hadow and D. Brunning; Mrs. A. Stewart; Profs. W. C. J. Ross and J. Iball; Dr. Peter Brookes; Prof. P. C. Koller; Drs. R. M. Taylor, A. Dipple, and H. Buess; Prof. Sir Eric Scowen; the Council of the Royal Society; the Rev. Kent White of the Church of St. Mary Aldermary; Miss Kay Andrews of the House of Commons Library; Mr. G. Wilson of the Wellcome Museum of Medical History; Oxford University Press; Messrs. W. A. Coates of the Royal Institution,J. L. Everett, W. Cox, J. Edwards, and many others, to all of whom my grateful thanks are extended. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Summer 1974 | 543 Fig. 1,—Professor Sir Ernest L. Kennaway, FRS Fig. 2.—Percivall Pott, FRS boyhood, was wont to write a diary of his naturalistic observations and so provided a hint of what was to come. Kennaway was a Middlesex and an Oxford man, and, holding the Radcliffe Fellowship, through his travels, particularly in Germany (see, for instance, [4] regarding the time he spent with Kossel at Heidelberg), early became steeped in the German chemistry of the time and especially in chemical nomenclature. As things are now emerging [5], it was, I think, prophetic that his German work concerned itself largely with the purines [6-8]. I. Some Aspects ofKennaway's Life and Work Ernest Laurence Kennaway was born in 1881 and died on New Year's Day of 1958 (the year of the Seventh International Cancer Congress in London) in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, guarded, as we have liked to imagine, by the shade of his great forerunner, Percivall Pott [9] (fig. 2), who, from the same place, in 1775 in his Chirurgical Observations described cancer of the scrotum as an occupational hazard in chimney sweeps, attributable to contamination of the skin with soot. This was among the first of a series of undesigned experiments which were greatly to elucidate the problems of cancer genesis. Among these experiments , Dr. R. M. Taylor and Dr. A. Dipple have drawn my attention to the 1759 description by Dr. John HiII [10] of London (1716-1775) of what he referred to, in a communication entitled "Cautions against the Immoderate Use of Snuff, Founded on the Known Qualities of the Tobacco Plant...
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