The epic fall of Werner Bezwoda was a terminal blow to the ambitions of megadose chemotherapy. In the summer of 1999, a final trial was designed to examine whether STAMP might increase survival among women with breast cancer that had spread to multiple lymph nodes. Four years later, the answer was clear. There was no discernible benefit. Of the five hundred patients assigned to the high-dose group, nine died of transplantation-related complications. An additional nine developed highly aggressive, chemotherapy-resistant acute myeloid leukemias as a consequence of their treatments—cancers far
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