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February 20 - March 11, 2025
streptomycin, was purified out of a clod of mold from a chicken farmer’s barnyard,
New drugs appeared at an astonishing rate: by 1950, more than half the medicines in common medical use had been unknown merely a decade earlier.
In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. “I’m sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. “Perhaps,” the editor continued, “you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall.”
By feeding patients increasingly macabre concoctions—half a pound of chicken liver, half-cooked hamburgers, raw hog stomach, and even once the regurgitated gastric juices of one of his students (spiced up with butter, lemon, and parsley)—Minot and his team of researchers conclusively demonstrated in 1926 that pernicious anemia was caused by the lack of a critical micronutrient, a single molecule later identified as vitamin B12. In 1934, Minot and two of his colleagues won the Nobel Prize for this pathbreaking work.
Subbarao purified a molecule called ATP, the source of energy in all living beings (ATP carries chemical “energy” in the cell), and another molecule called creatine, the energy carrier in muscle cells. Any one of these achievements should have been enough to guarantee him a professorship at Harvard. But Subbarao was a foreigner, a reclusive, nocturnal, heavily accented vegetarian who lived in a one-room apartment downtown, befriended only by other nocturnal recluses such as Farber.
Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically “tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards.” They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn’t it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just “let them die in peace”? When one clinician suggested that Farber’s novel “chemicals” be reserved only as a last resort for leukemic children, Farber, recalling his prior life as a pathologist, shot back, “By that time, the only chemical that you will need will be embalming fluid.”
The trouble lies in finding a selective poison—a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient.
On the foggy night of July 12, 1917, two years after Ehrlich’s death, a volley of artillery shells marked with small, yellow crosses rained down on British troops stationed near the small Belgian town of Ypres.
That their bullet would eventually appear out of that very chemical weapon seemed like a perversion of specific affinity, a ghoulish distortion of Ehrlich’s dream.
A product of the 1930s, Farber was instinctively frugal (“You can take the child out of the Depression, but you can’t take the Depression out of the child,” Leonard Lauder liked to say about his generation),
It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself. But there is another moment of discovery—its antithesis—that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient’s CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A
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Sisyphus on chemotherapy.
“She will try anything, anything,” her husband pleaded. “She is stronger than she looks.” But strong or not, there was nothing left to try. I stared down at my feet, unable to confront the obvious questions. The attending physician shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Beatrice finally broke the awkward silence. “I’m sorry.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked vacantly past us. “I know we have reached an end.” We hung our heads, ashamed. It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline.
In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.
the basic purpose is not to save that patient’s particular life but to find means of saving the lives of others.”
His weight shrank from 158 to 106 pounds. One day in 1974, while he was still receiving chemo, his wife suggested that they sit outside to enjoy the afternoon. Cleland realized, to his utter shame, that he was too weak to stand up. He was carried to his bed like a baby, weeping with embarrassment.
