But for Farber, the study carried a tantalizing message: cancer, even in its most aggressive form, had been treated with a medicine, a chemical. In six months between 1947 and 1948, Farber thus saw a door open—briefly, seductively—then close tightly shut again. And through that doorway, he glimpsed an incandescent possibility. The disappearance of an aggressive systemic cancer via a chemical drug was virtually unprecedented in the history of cancer. In the summer of 1948, when one of Farber’s assistants performed a bone marrow biopsy on a leukemic child after treatment with aminopterin, the
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