Lab at Hershey Medical Center identifies a virus that could kill cancer
This is not the kind of lab we picture when we think of world-changing science. It’s not the clean, spotless modern laboratories of television or movies.
It’s a cluttered, workaday environment, where plastic test tubes rub shoulders with petri dishes and tubs of chemicals on busy shelves.
The white board isn’t covered with the scrawl of complex mathematical formulas, but reminders of whose turn it is to buy the doughnuts.
But it is here, on the fifth floor of the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where Dr. Craig Meyers and his team might have conducted a miracle.
What he and his lab claim discovery of is breathtaking in its simplicity.
A common virus, omnipresent in the world.
When it infects humans, it does no harm.
But introduce it into certain kinds of tumors and the virus appears to go wild, liquefying every cancer cell it comes into contact with.
It’s the type of discovery that could change the world.
And like all great stories of scientific discovery, it begins with a moment of sublime serendipity, not unlike Isaac Newton nodding off beneath an apple tree.