These wards created not just a psychological isolation chamber but also a physical microenvironment, a sterile bubble where the core theory of cancer chemotherapy—eradicating cancer with a death-defying bombardment of drugs—could be adequately tested. It was, undeniably, an experiment. At the NIH, Alsop wrote pointedly, “Saving the individual patient is not the essential mission. Enormous efforts are made to do so, or at least to prolong the patient’s life to the last possible moment. But the basic purpose is not to save that patient’s particular life but to find means of saving the lives of
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