Cisplatin was touted as the epic chemotherapeutic product of the late 1970s, the quintessential example of how curing cancer involved pushing patients nearly to the brink of death. By 1978, cisplatin-based chemotherapy was the new vogue in cancer pharmacology; every conceivable combination was being tested on thousands of patients across America. The lemon-yellow chemical dripping through intravenous lines was as ubiquitous in the cancer wards as the patients clutching their nausea basins afterward.
