Can you imagine two fields that are less related than cancer research and textiles? While you may know that the paths of cancer and fabric intersect in the many breast cancer fabrics available, you may not be aware of a much more important role that the textile industry played in the development of cancer treatments.
This little known chapter was illuminated for J&O Fabric Store recently by The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, an outstanding book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. In his rigorously researched book, Mukherjee reveals how the growth of the English cotton industry in the early- to mid- 19th century precipitated a consequent increase in the need for dyes. Nevertheless, the manufacture of dyes was more primitive technologically; both the process of extracting dyes and of using them to dye cloth were laborious and inexact. The textile industry turned to chemists in order to achieve an efficiency in creating and applying dyes that would be commensurate with the efficiency in the production of cotton cloth.
In response to the textile industry’s needs the discipline of practical chemistry soon flourished with the aim of creating efficient synthetic dyes. It would fall to a student at one of London’s technical institutes to discover what textile manufacturers sought. His name was William Perkin and in 1856 – at only eighteen years of age – he stumbled upon a solution while boiling nitric acid and benzene in a laboratory. Perkin noticed that a by-product of his experiment was a pale violet-colored chemical. Further experiments indicated that when used to dye silk the dye remained stable even when exposed to light or washed. Even more fortuitous was Perkin’s discovery that the parent compound for aniline mauve could be used to create other dyes. In less than a decade synthetic dyes were in use throughout Europe. In recognition for his efforts William Perkin was made a full fellow of the Chemical Society of London at a mere nineteen years old.
William Perkin as a young man
William Perkin's Dye Recipe Book
The original mauve made by William Perkin
The next step in the story takes us to Germany where chemists seized on Perkin’s work and began to create more than simply dyes, but also new molecules. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of chemicals being created a practical application for many of them had not yet been proposed.
Yet in this chain of events a key link had been overlooked. In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler synthesized a chemical produced by the kidneys: urea; in doing so he proved the inextricable link between biology and chemistry. The question then was whether a synthetic molecule could have a biological application. The problem that Wöhler encountered was that more complex molecules were needed to interact with living cells. Molecules which could be found in Germany’s dye factories.
Friedrich Wöhler and his discovery
Fifty years passed before Paul Ehrlich realized the correlation between the work of chemists working on fabric dyes and the principles expounded by Wöhler. In 1878, Ehrlich was a young medical student who sought to use aniline dyes to stain animal tissues. What his experiment showed was that the dyeing agents stained parts of cells, leaving others untouched. The dyes manifested a surprising affinity for certain molecules. Ehrlich’s research over the ensuing years demonstrated a remarkable specificity between certain chemicals and specific molecules. In view of these results, could a chemical be engineered to distinguish to target bacterial cells without harming healthy cells? In describing his idea, Ehrlich said: “it should be possible to find artificial substances which are really and specifically curative for certain diseases”.
Paul Ehrlich
Ehrlich’s search brought him once again to the chemicals that the dye industry had synthesized. Being that his laboratory was within walking distance of two major dye producers in Frankfurt, he was able to procure thousands of chemical compounds on which to experiment. The fruits of his experiments produced Trypan Red and Salvarsan. The former killed trypanosomes – the organism responsible for sleeping sickness, while the latter was active against Treponema pallidum – the microbe that causes syphilis.
Tyrpan Red and Salvarsan both targeted microbial agents. Ehrlich’s next target was the malignant human cell. To his dismay he found it impossible to synthesize a chemical that could specifically target cancer cells without also destroying normal cells. Although this particular line of investigation produced no new drugs from Ehrlich, he did provide future cancer researchers with a direction in which to aim their efforts: the search for specificity. Cancer researchers would continue to search for chemicals that could specifically target
cancer cells. Without realizing it, Ehrlich’s pioneering research laid the groundwork for chemotherapy.
The molecular composition of Salvarsan
And that is how in a serendipitous moment in the 19th century the textile industry provided a small but important impetus for cancer research.
