The treatment lasted up to two and a half years; it involved multiple exposures to radiation, scores of blood tests, dozens of spinal taps, and multiple intravenous drugs—a strategy so precise and demanding that one journal refused to publish it, concerned that it was impossible to even dose it and monitor it correctly393 without killing several patients in the trials. Even at St. Jude’s, the regimen was considered so overwhelmingly toxic that the trial was assigned to relatively junior physicians under Pinkel’s supervision because the senior researchers, knowing its risks394, did not want to
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