George Moore, 88; doctor linked mouth cancer to chewing tobacco
6/23/2008 Los Angeles, CA Thomas H. Maugh II Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com) Dr. George E. Moore, the cancer researcher who was among the first to link chewing tobacco to mouth cancer and who built the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., into a major cancer research center, died May 19 in Conifer, Colo. He was 88. The cause of death was bladder cancer, according to his family. George E. Moore also discovered the use of fluorescent and radioactive materials to diagnose and localize brain tumors, was a pioneer in the use of chemotherapy to treat breast cancer, and developed techniques for growing tumor cells in a laboratory. When Moore did his first studies of tobacco chewing in the 1950s, there was little strong evidence linking smoking and lung cancer and virtually none tying tobacco to other cancers. In a seminal 1954 paper, Moore and colleagues from Roswell Park and the University of Minnesota reported on 40 men who suffered from oral cancer. They found that 26 of them had chewed tobacco, most for 15 years or longer. The paper presented the first evidence that chewing tobacco could be as lethal as smoking it. Extending their studies, they also found that many people who chewed but did not yet have mouth cancer had gum irritation and leukoplasia -- white spots or patches on the interior of the mouth that are often a forerunner of cancer. His discoveries put Moore on the leading edge of tobacco research for more than 15 [...]