Our Living Chemistry Series was conceived by Editor and Publisher to advance the newer knowledge of medicine in the cause of clinical practice. The interdependence of chemistry and medicine is so great that physicians are turning to chemistry, and chemists to medicine in order to understand the underlying basis of life processes in health and disease. Once chemical truths, proofs and convictions become sound foundations for clinical phenomena, key hybrid investigators clarify the bewildering panorama of biochemical progress for application in everyday practice, stimulation of experimental research, and extension of postgraduate instruction. Each of our monographs thus unravels the chemical mechanisms and clinical management of many diseases that have remained relatively static in the minds of medical men for three thousand years. Our new Series is charged with the nisus elan of chemical wisdom, supreme in choice of international authors, optimal in standards of chemical scholarship, provocative in imagination for experimental research, comprehensive in discussions of scientific medicine, and authoritative in chemical perspective of human disorders.

Dr. Furst of San Francisco presents the chelation basis of cancer. It is a clinical inference deduced from chemical knowledge with high probability in view of the fact that some metals cause cancer by altering enzymic activity, that many carcinogens metabolize to metal binding agents which penetrate the cell, and that most chemotherapeutic compounds inactivate by metal binding the enzymes essential for tumor growth. Credite rebus. The experimental studies elaborated proceed from these established facts to the kind of correlated uniformities that weave a meaningful pattern in clinical chemistry. Metal cofactors are viewed not as incidental contaminants of biochemical systems but as critical centers of coordination chemistry unveiled for cancer chemotherapy.

Chelation means clawing, coined by G. T. Morgan (1920) from A. Werner's (1910) original concept to express the tenacity with which a coordinating group holds a metal ion. It involves the formation of an organic heterocyclic ring containing a polyvalent metallic ion. The metal is attached by coordinate links to nonmetal atoms in the same molecule as a stable, water soluble, non ionic metallic ring. A chelating agent with the lowest possible entropy combines spontaneously with a metal ion of low entropy to produce a marked increase in entropy bond strength and stability. Such an organic complex inactivates the metallic ion by the formation of an inner ring structure in the molecule with consequent loss of ionic function of weak Lewis acid, electron transfer system and electron distribution of surrounding molecules.

A chelate constitutes a potent pharmacologic weapon in modifying enzymic processes in living systems. Natural chelates bridge the gap between the inorganic and organic worlds propagating and maintaining life comfortably via chlorophyll, hemoglobin, glutathione, enzymes, hormones and vitamins to such an extent that the chemistry of life may yet be resolved from the chemistry of inorganic metal ions uniquely amplified by organic cofactors. Synthetic chelates bridge the gap between health and disease decelerating biochemical reactions by pharmacological plan whether it be Ca++ removal by citrate complex formation, Cu+ + by BAL in hepatolenticular degeneration, Pb+ + by EDTA, metal ions by exchange resins, or metal binding by chemothera peutic agents elucidated herein. Recent advances in the quantitative approach to coordination in solution, quantitative application of the ligand field theory and others revealed by the author are catapulting the clinical applications of coordination chemistry logarithmically for unravelling the innumerable and interlinked reactions that determine the natural course and unique behavior of the thing called Man.

To the dialectitian chelation is an idea,

To the bel esprit a picture,

To the enthusiast a dream,

To the scientist alone it is a truth.

I. Newton Kugelmass, M.D., Ph.D., Sc.D., Editor