Donald Abrams, who, at thirty-one, was the youngest doctor on the GRID team, was strongly asserting that clinicians had to drop the time-tested use of chemotherapy on these KS patients. That might be what the experts tell you to do, he maintained, but the textbooks were all written before GRID. Chemotherapy worked only because it kept cells from dividing. Since cancer cells, by definition, divided most rapidly, the therapy frequently slowed the cancer. But it also slowed the normal cells that were supposed to divide, such as in the mouth, the gastrointestinal tract, and most significantly, the
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