Pub. 3 2013 Issue 1

11 Mining Focus gas as a military weapon. It killed or injured thousands of people because it blistered any tissue it touched, including the lungs. So many people were hurt by mustard gas that doctors decided to study its effects both during World War I and after. As a result of their research, they found that victims who had been exposed to mustard gas had a dramatic increase in blood production. When World War II began, the allied forces were worried about chemical war f are f rom bot h t he Germans and the Japanese even though the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibited this kind of warfare. (The Chemical We a p o n s Co nv e n t i o n o f 19 9 3 also included a prohibition.) The Department of Defense recruited two pharmacologists, Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, to determine what kind of impact chemical warfare agents had on the human body. In December 1943, the Germans conducted an air raid over Bari, Italy. As a result of this attack, more than a thousand people were exposed to a cargo of mustard gas bombs. A l i eu tenant co l one l named Dr. Alexander was sent to Bari because of his expertise in chemical warfare. He conducted autopsies on those who had died because of their exposure to the mustard gas, and what he found was that mustard gas stopped some kinds of cells from dividing, even though normally these cells would have divided rapidly. He developed a theory that since the mustard gas had stopped these cell divisions, it might be possible to target rapidly dividing cancer cells and use mustard gas to stop them from dividing, too. The two pharmacologists, Goodman and Gilman, saw the results of Dr. Alexander’s work, along with his theory, and they thought mustard gas might be a possible treatment for lymphoma. They conducted animal tests with a similar chemical, called mustine, and then they tested it on a patient who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Mustine is a chemical that is synthesized from coal- based chemicals. The patient’s tumor shrank dramatically, although the effect only lasted a few weeks and had to be repeated. This was the first example of modern chemotherapy. Researchwas also done at YaleUniversity in the biology and chemistry departments. That, combined with the work done by Goodman and Gilman, led to the development of nitrogen mustard (called HN2) and a search for other chemical compounds that could be used as a weapon against cancer. continued on page 12 What most people don’t know is that chemotherapy relies heavily on drugs that are based on coal-based chemicals.