How Did a Bacterium That Stopped Dividing in an Electric Field Give Rise to a Cancer Drug? Rosenberg, VanCamp, Krigas and Cisplatin (1965-1978)

How Did a Bacterium That Stopped Dividing in an Electric Field Give Rise to a Cancer Drug? Rosenberg, VanCamp, Krigas and Cisplatin (1965-1978)

A cell that resembled a magnetic field

Barnett Rosenberg was a physicist. According to the RSC's obituary, on 1 October 1961 he came to Michigan State University with Leroy Augenstein to found a biophysics unit. According to the Open University's account, a picture of a dividing cell reminded him of the dipole field lines of a magnet; he wanted to see whether an electric field affected division. According to the Golden Goose Award page, in 1963 Loretta VanCamp started the project on the effect of an electric field on dividing E. coli and ran all the experiments; the RSC article also says VanCamp did all the experimental work. Golden Goose calls her the laboratory director, the RSC a laboratory technician.

The electrodes were platinum, considered chemically inert; the medium contained ammonium chloride (Open University). The bacteria stopped dividing but kept growing and became long filaments; Golden Goose and the University of Bristol chemistry page describe filaments up to 300 times normal length. The first explanation that came to mind was the electric field. The truth had nothing to do with the field.

Autumn 1964: what comes off a platinum electrode?

According to Golden Goose, in the autumn of 1964 the chemistry graduate student Thomas Krigas proposed that the platinum of the electrodes was reacting in the medium. The RSC article instead says the electrolysis hypothesis came from an unnamed chemistry faculty member and reached Rosenberg through Krigas; the two sources conflict and I could not resolve it. According to the same obituary, the graduate student James Trosko witnessed the experiment and reports that Rosenberg said before the experiments that he would "cure cancer"; this corrects accounts that the research was not cancer-directed. The piece is a tribute written by colleagues; it should be read as personal recollection.

From bacteria to tumours

According to Golden Goose, in 1968 Rosenberg tried cisplatin in mice carrying Sarcoma 180; the RSC article says they began treatment not the day after tumour implantation, as was standard, but once tumours had reached about a gram, and reported a high percentage of complete cures. The abstract of the paper that appeared in 1969 in Nature volume 222 (385-386) says that certain platinum compounds completely but reversibly inhibit cell division in Gram-negative rods and inhibited Sarcoma 180 and L1210 leukaemia in mice (Springer page; I have not read the whole paper).

What followed was a long road. According to Golden Goose the first Phase I trial took place in England in 1971, while the RSC article says clinical trials began in the USA in 1971; NCI-funded US trials began in 1972 (Golden Goose). In 1973, at a platinum meeting at Wadham College, Oxford, shrinkage was reported in 20 women with advanced ovarian cancer and partial responses in 11 testicular cancer patients in New York, three with complete responses. At the Marsden Hospital Eve Wiltshaw showed activity in ovarian cancer (Open University). An obstacle stood in the way: kidney toxicity. Physicians learned to protect the kidneys with mannitol diuresis, using large volumes of fluid (Golden Goose, RSC).

Lawrence Einhorn, who joined Indiana University in 1973 as its first medical oncologist, combined cisplatin in testicular cancer with vinblastine and bleomycin (PVB). According to IU's 2024 article, John Cleland was among the first patients to accept the trial that began in 1974. According to CureToday's 2004 patient story, the first PVB treatment was given on 7 October 1974; about 10 days later the lung tumours were gone; the word "cure" began to be used after about a year. The abstract of Einhorn and Donohue's 1977 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine says: in 50 patients, 74% complete and 26% partial response; five of the partial responders became disease-free after surgery, giving an overall disease-free rate of 85%; with follow-up of 6 to over 30 months, 32 patients were alive and disease-free. In 1978 the FDA approved cisplatin for ovarian and testicular cancers.

A seminoma series from Edirne

My sources show no link between Turkey and this discovery in the 1960s, and I do not invent one. There is a measurable present-day data point: the retrospective series by Gökyer, Küçükarda and Köstek from the Medical Oncology Department of Trakya University Faculty of Medicine in Namık Kemal Tıp Dergisi (2019;7(2):128-132) covers 125 patients with pure seminoma followed in 2008-2018. Of the 63 patients who received chemotherapy, 25 received BEP (bleomycin, etoposide, cisplatin) and 38 single-agent carboplatin. Five-year overall survival was 95.3% (84 patients) and ten-year 88.9% (45 patients); 97.2% in stage 1 and 66.7% in stage 3, but only 3 stage 3 patients reached five years. The paper has internal inconsistencies (the number receiving chemotherapy appears as 40 and 63); I read the figures as a single-centre table with small subgroups. My inference: the descendants of Indiana's 1974 trial are also in the algorithms in Turkey today; but seminoma is not the main disease of the PVB story, and this data does not prove cisplatin's effect.

This article is Day 141 of the "365 Days of Cancer History" series and tells the discovery of cisplatin as a historical event. It is historical-popular content, not a diagnosis or treatment recommendation. For treatment decisions, consult your physician. The sources are verified; details that rest on a secondary source alone or could not be read are marked in the fact-check notes.