Alan Gregg (1890–1957) was an American physician and influential administrator in medical research and education. He spent most of his career at the Rockefeller Foundation, serving for many years as director of its Division of Medical Sciences and later as vice president. His interests included public health, medicine and the broader biological implications of human population growth.
A MEDICAL ASPECT OF THE POPULATION PROBLEM
Presented in 1954 — Published in 1955
Alan Gregg begins from a medical observation: in a healthy organism, the growth of organs and tissues is normally regulated. Cells proliferate during development, pregnancy or physiological adaptation, but their growth eventually stops. Malignant neoplasms are the great exception: their cells appear to have lost the mechanisms of limitation and continue to multiply beyond the requirements of the organism.
Gregg then proposes a speculative change of scale. If the many forms of plant and animal life on Earth are regarded as interdependent components of a single living system, they can be compared, provisionally, with the different cells and tissues of an organism. Humanity may then be examined as a physician might examine one particular cellular population within a patient.
From this perspective, Gregg asks what it would mean if one form of life increased extraordinarily rapidly, at the expense of the others. His deliberately provocative formulation is that “the world has cancer” and that humanity can be regarded as its cancerous cell.
He stresses that this is a hypothesis rather than an experimentally demonstrated theory. But he argues that its usefulness can be tested by asking whether other characteristics of malignant growth have analogues in human expansion.
The first is pressure. A growing tumor displaces and eventually damages surrounding tissues. Gregg compares this with the displacement and extinction of other forms of life caused by expanding human populations. On islands and other confined environments, human invasion can eliminate species that have nowhere else to escape.
The second is invasion. Malignant cells extend directly into territories occupied by normal tissues. Gregg sees a comparable process in deforestation, the destruction or near-extinction of animal species, soil erosion and the progressive human occupation of ecological space.
The third is metastasis. Cancer cells can detach from a primary tumor, travel through the organism and establish new colonies at distant sites. Gregg explicitly asks whether the colonization of the Western Hemisphere might be regarded, structurally, as a form of metastasis.
A fourth parallel concerns resources. A malignant growth makes increasing nutritional demands upon the organism that sustains it, while the organism as a whole loses strength. Gregg compares this with humanity’s growing appropriation of planetary resources and its destructive effects on other forms of life.
Finally, he invokes necrosis. The interior of a rapidly growing tumor may die as its disordered growth exceeds the capacity of its circulation to sustain it. Gregg provocatively compares this pathological degradation with the slums of large cities — zones produced within the very process of uncontrolled human expansion.
What makes Gregg especially important to the intellectual history of Cancerism is therefore not a single striking metaphor. In 1954–1955 he was already attempting a point-by-point structural comparison between malignant growth and the behaviour of the human species within the larger living system of the Earth.
KEY AFFINITIES WITH CANCERISM
- Loss of growth regulation
- Uncontrolled proliferation
- Displacement and destruction of other forms of life
- Ecological invasion
- Colonization as metastasis
- Excessive appropriation of resources
- Damage to the sustaining host system
- Necrosis within the expanding human system
Source: Alan Gregg, “A Medical Aspect of the Population Problem,” Science, Vol. 121, No. 3150, 13 May 1955, pp. 681–682. Based on a paper presented at the AAAS symposium “Population Problems,” Berkeley, California, 28 December 1954. DOI: 10.1126/science.121.3150.681.
