Recently we reported that an unsaturated fatty acid fraction of pig pancreatic tissue had a strong inhibiting action against the active agent of chicken tumor I. This fatty acid had physical and chemical properties similar to those of oleic acid. In fact, commercial oleic acid was found to exert a comparable inhibiting action. The inhibiting action of this unsaturated fatty acid fraction was destroyed by hydrogenation. Pirie, in England, reported similar findings. The specificity of the biological properties of the fatty acids and their soaps has been shown by many investigators to be dependent upon structure. Lamar, Larson and his associates, and others have shown that the germicidal and hemolytic properties of the soaps vary greatly with the length of the carbon chain and the degree of saturation. Clowes and his coworkers have shown that the type of cytolysis of sea urchin eggs was greatly modified when the eggs were exposed to different types of soaps. Nakahara, working in Murphy9s laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, found that the unsaturated fatty acids would increase the resistance of mice to transplantable adenocarcinoma, whereas the saturated fatty acids would not. In view of these facts, a series of fatty acids has been studied in order to determine the effect of their chemical configuration on their ability to inhibit the active agent of chicken tumor I.
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Helmer et al. (1937) studied this question.