Spiroptera carcinoma
| Gongylonema neoplasticum | |
|---|---|
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Nematoda |
| Class: | Secernentea |
| Order: | Spirurida |
| Suborder: | Spirurina |
| Superfamily: | Spiruroidea |
| Family: | Gongylonematidae |
| Genus: | Gongylonema |
| Species: | G. neoplasticum |
| Binomial name | |
|
Gongylonema neoplasticum (Fibiger & Ditlevsen, 1914) Ditlevsen, 1918 |
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Gongylonema neoplasticum (more famously as Spiroptera carcinoma) is a roundworm parasite of rats. It was discovered by a Danish physician Johannes Fibiger in 1907. Fibiger and Hjalmar Ditlevsen made a formal description in 1914 as Spiroptera (Gongylonema) neoplastica. But Ditlevsen gave the final valid name Gongylonema neoplasticum in 1918. The nematode is transmitted between rats and cockroaches.
When Fibiger discovered the nematode in the stomach of rats, he found that the stomach had tumours. Inspired by the possible link of the nematode and tumour, he performed experiments to induce tumours with nematode infection. He published his experimental success in 1913. The nematode experiment earned Fibiger the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but under controversial circumstances. Moreover, it was later proven that Fibiger came to a wrong conclusion, that the nematode is not carcinogenic. Erling Norrby, who had served as the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Professor and Chairman of Vorology at the Karolinska Institute, declared Fibiger's Nobel Prize as "one of the biggest blunders made by the Karolinska Institute."
A Danish physician, Johannes Fibiger, while working as Director of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Copenhagen, dissected some wild rats collected from Dorpat (officially Tartu, now in Estonia) in 1907. He discovered nematodes and their eggs in the stomach of rats, and more importantly, the rats had stomach tumour (papilloma). He found that some tumours were metastatic (cancerous), from which he built a hypothesis that the nematodes caused stomach cancer. After five years he experimentally demonstrated that the nematode could induced stomach cancer. He published his discovery in a series of three papers in 1913, and also presented them at the Académie Royale des Sciences et des Lettres de Danemark (Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters), and Troisième Conférence Internationale pour l’Étude du Cancer (Third International Conference for Researches in Cancer [my translation]) at Brussels the same year. He knew that the nematode was a new species, and provisionally named it Spiroptera carcinom in 1914. With the help of Hjalmar Ditlevsen, of the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen, he made a complete zoological description and named it Spiroptera (Gongylonema) neoplastica in 1914. Ditlevsen revised the description in 1918, and gave the final valid name Gongylonema neoplasticum.
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