Kanematsu Sugiura was a cancer researcher, who spent his career at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Background
Kanematsu was born on June 5, 1892 in Tsushima-shi, just west of Nagoya, Japan, the youngest of seven children of Seisuke Sugiura and Miyono Aoki. His father, a dyemaker, kendo master, and former samurai, died of cancer when the boy was only eight, plunging the family into financial difficulties.
Education
He was a top student, at the age of thirteen he was an apprentice in the hardware trade. He was attending evening classes as an undergraduate at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, from which he received his B. S. in chemistry in 1915. Two years of summer classes at Columbia University earned him the M. A. in chemistry in 1917.
Career
While Sugiura's older brother Kamasaburo was serving as the official interpreter for the American railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman in negotiations with the Japanese government in 1905, Harriman became entranced by demonstrations of the ancient Japanese martial arts of jujitsu and kenjitsu. He decided to bring five Japanese boys, including Kanematsu, to the United States to entertain President Theodore Roosevelt and other prominent Americans with displays of judo and kendo. After six months, Harriman offered full financial support to any of the five who chose to stay in America. Only Sugiura accepted the offer, and he did so despite his homesickness, because he knew it was his only chance for a college education.
He lived in New York City with the Harriman family physician, William G. Lyle, attended P. S. 69 and, from 1908 to 1911, Townsend Harris Hall High School. After school he worked in the laboratories of Roosevelt Hospital. When Harriman died of cancer in 1909, leaving $1 million to found the Harriman Research Laboratory (HRL) at Roosevelt Hospital, Sugiura decided to dedicate his life to cancer research.
He started working under Lyle at HRL as an assistant chemist in 1911, and in 1912 began studying the chemotherapy of cancer.
In the early twentieth century the medical community in general considered the hypothesis odd that since cancer was probably caused by certain chemical insults, it could be cured or managed by chemicals. Nevertheless, Sugiura and his colleages at HRL remained steadfast in their early commitment to developing drug therapies for cancer. HRL promoted Sugiura to associate chemist in 1917.
However, that same year the Harriman family withdrew its support and the facility was forced to close. Sugiura was immediately hired by Dr. James Ewing as an assistant chemist at the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, formerly the New York Cancer Hospital.
He continued to hold his old HRL title until 1928, and from 1923 to 1931 he was the Harriman Research Fund fellow at New York University and Bellevue Hospital College of Medicine.
Memorial promoted him to research chemist in 1925. The same year Kyoto Imperial University awarded him an Sc. D.
Thanks to the intercession of several prominent American physicians and scientists, including Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, then director of Memorial Hospital and chief of the Medical Division of the U. S. Chemical Warfare Service, Sugiura was not interned during World War II, although he was still a Japanese citizen. His movements were severely restricted, however, and he lived out the war under virtual house arrest, cut off from the main focus of his research but still able to continue his work.
The government permitted him to travel between his home on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and the old Memorial Hospital at 106th Street and Central Park West, Manhattan, but refused to let him go to his usual workplace, the new Memorial Hospital at 444 East Sixty-eighth Street, Manhattan, where research with radioactive isotopes was being conducted. He weathered this political storm well, and kept his high spirits intact. He became an American citizen in 1953.
After the war Sugiura resumed the full scope of his search for effective chemotherapies for malignancies. In 1947 he was made an associate member of the recently founded Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, serving as head of the Solid Tumor Section of the Division of Experimental Chemotherapy.
In 1959 he became a member of the institute, and in 1962 an emeritus member.
Even long after his retirement, Sugiura kept active in his field, commuting nearly every day from his home in Harrison, New York, to the Sloan-Kettering Institute's Walker Laboratory in Rye, New York. He died in 1979.
Views
Sugiura concentrated on the chemotherapeutic properties of compounds whose palliative effects had been discovered either during or just after the war, including nitrogen mustards, purines, pyrimidines, steroids, antimetabolites such as methotrexate, and antibiotics such as mitomycin C. At Sloan-Kettering he analyzed literally thousands of imaginable carcinostats and suspected carcinogens for more than one hundred transplantable tumors.
Connections
On October 20, 1923, Sugiura married Zoe Marie Claeys; they had one daughter.
Kanematsu Sugiura is perhaps best known for his work on laetrile
a controversial alternative cancer treatment
which he was convinced had a palliative effect on certain mice tumors. His research enjoyed marked success and resulted in many practical advances in patient care. He had published over eighty-two scientific papers.