When Catharina Svanborg and her research associates began mixing mothers' milk and cancer cells together seven years ago, she wasn't looking for a cure for cancer; she was after a way to fight germs. Nevertheless, the physician and immunologist at Lund University in Sweden has discovered that a previously taken-for-granted component of ordinary human breast milk compels cancer cells--every type of cancercell tested--to die. Now Svanborg must prove her discovery, demonstrating to wary scientists that her surprising find is for real. So far, it hasn't been easy.
“It’s an extremely important observation, interesting and provocative,” says breast cancer researcher David Salomon of the National Cancer Institute. “But it’s novel, and novelty always runs the risk of challenging the current dogma. A lot of times you run up against a brick wall of people who have tunnel vision.”
It doesn’t help that Svanborg’s lab is not a large, high-profile cancer research facility. In fact, it’s not a cancer lab at all; her specialty is an entirely different field, infectious disease. Says Salomon: “If this work had come from a well-known lab at the NCI, you’d have reporters calling six days to Sunday. You’d have scientists eager to collaborate. But it’s coming from a small lab in a foreign country. It’s like General Motors versus a garage operation.”
If so, this is the kind of garage you’d take your Porsche to. Tall, poised, and professional to the core, Svanborg leads a team of dedicated young researchers who have worked overtime to make their discovery matter. With the first phase of research finally finished, the group has decided to launch a fusillade of papers to scientific journals. Soon skeptics may have a tough time denying that they are onto something big.
Lund is dark and bleak in winter. A medieval town of 95,000 people (almost half are students), it nestles into Sweden’s southern tip. At its heart stands a twelfth-century cathedral with Romanesque towers that disappear into the gloomy low mist. As an occasional vehicle slowly skirts the town’s commons, bundled bicyclists glide by silently. People hunch forward against the cold. Across the way, university halls from the seventeenth century proclaim in stone Lund’s role as Scandinavia’s historical center of learning.
