The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (97 page)

174
Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma:
Denis Burkitt, “A Sarcoma Involving the Jaws in African Children,”
British Journal of Surgery
46, no. 197 (1958): 218–23.

175
“Cancer may be infectious”:
“New Evidence That Cancer May Be Infectious,”
Life
, June 22, 1962. Also see “Virus Link Found,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 30, 1964.

175
“Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ?”:
Letter from Mary Kirkpatrick to Peyton Rous, June 23, 1962, Peyton Rous papers, the American Philosophical Society, quoted in James T. Patterson,
The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 237.

175
the NCI inaugurated a Special Virus Cancer Program:
Nicholas Wade, “Special Virus Cancer Program: Travails of a Biological Moonshot,”
Science
174, no. 4016(1971): 1306–11.

175
the cancer virus program siphoned away more than 10 percent:
Ibid.

176
“Relatively few viruses”:
Peyton Rous, “The Challenge to Man of the Neoplastic Cell,” Nobel lecture, December 13, 1966,
Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine, 1963–1970
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1972).

176
“Relatively few viruses”:
Peyton Rous, “Surmise and Fact on the Nature of Cancer,”
Nature
183, no. 4672 (1959): 1357–61.

177
“The program directed by the National Cancer Institute”:
“Hunt Continues for Cancer Drug,”
New York Times
, October 13, 1963.

177
“The iron is hot and this is the time”:
Letter from Sidney Farber to Mary Lasker, September 4, 1965, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 171.

177
“No large mission or goal-directed effort”:
Mary Lasker, “Need for a Commission on the Conquest of Cancer as a National Goal by 1976,” Mary Lasker Papers, Box 111.

177
Solomon Garb, a little-known professor of pharmacology:
Solomon Garb,
Cure for Cancer: A National Goal
(New York: Springer, 1968).

177
“A major hindrance to the cancer effort”:
Ibid.

178
At 4:17 p.m. EDT on July 20, 1969:
“The Moon: A Giant Leap for Mankind,”
Time
, July 25, 1969.

178
“magnificent desolation”:
Buzz Aldrin,
Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon
(New York: Harmony Books, 2009).

178
“It suddenly struck me”:
“Space: The Greening of the Astronauts,”
Time
, December 11, 1972.

178
“It was a stunning scientific and intellectual accomplishment”:
“The Moon,”
Time.

178
When Max Faget, the famously taciturn engineer:
Glen E. Swanson,
Before This Decade Is Out: Personal Reflections on the Apollo Program
(Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1999), 374.

179
In her letters, Mary Lasker began:
Lasker, “Need for a Commission.”

179
Lister Hill, the Alabama senator:
“Two Candidates in Primary in Alabama Count
Ways They Love Wallace,”
New York Times
, May 27, 1968.

179
Edward Kennedy, Farber’s ally from Boston:
“Conflicted Ambitions, Then, Chappaquiddick,”
Boston Globe
, February 17, 2009.

179
“We’re in the worst,” Lasker recalled:
Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part II, Session 5, p. 125.

“A moon shot for cancer”

180
The relationship of government:
William Carey, “Research Development and the Federal Budget,” Seventeenth National Conference on the Administration of Research, September 11, 1963.

180
What has Santa Nixon:
Robert Semple,
New York Times
, December 26, 1971.

180
On December 9, 1969, on a chilly Sunday:
Advertisement from the American Cancer Society,
New York Times
, December 17, 1971.

181
in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Cancer Ward: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Cancer Ward
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).

181
in
Love Story: Erich Segal,
Love Story
, DVD, directed by Arthur Hiller, 2001.

181
Bang the Drum Slowly,
a 1973 release
: Mark Harris,
Bang the Drum Slowly
, DVD, directed by John D. Hancock, 2003.

181
Brian’s Song,
the story of the Chicago Bears star:
Al Silverman, Gale Sayers, and William Blinn,
Brian’s Song
, DVD, directed by Buzz Kulik, 2000.

181
“plunged into numb agony”:
Richard A. Rettig,
Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971
(Lincoln, NE: Author’s Choice Press, 1977), 175.

181
“Cancer changes your life,” a patient wrote:
“My Fight against Cancer,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 6, 1973.

182
“A radical change happened to the perception”:
Renata Salecl,
On Anxiety
(London: Routledge, 2004), 4. Also Renata Salecl, interview with author, April 2006.

182
The “Big Bomb,” a columnist wrote:
Ellen Goodman, “A Fear That Fits the Times,” September 14, 1978.

183
“To oppose big spending against cancer”:
James T. Patterson,
The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 149.

183
Nixon often groused:
For Nixon’s comments, see National Archives and Records Administration, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, 513–14, June 7, 1971, transcribed by Daniel Greenberg. See I. I. Rabi, quoted in Daniel S. Greenberg,
The Politics of Pure Science
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.

184
Mary Lasker proposed that a “neutral” committee:
Rettig,
Cancer Crusade
, 82.

184
The commission, she wrote, should “include space scientists”:
Mary Lasker, “Need for a Commission on the Conquest of Cancer as a National Goal by 1976,” Mary Lasker Papers, Box 111.

184
Sidney Farber was selected as the cochairman:
Rettig,
Cancer Crusade
, 74–89.

184
Yarborough wrote to Mary Lasker in the summer of 1970:
Letter from Ralph W. Yarborough to Mary Lasker, June 2, 1970, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 112.

184
The panel’s final report:
The report was published in two documents in November 1970 and reprinted in December 1970 and April 1971. See Senate Document 92–99, 1
^st
sess., April 14, 1971. Also see Rettig,
Cancer Crusade
, 105.

185
“Not only can we afford the effort”:
Benno Schmidt, quoted by Alan C. Davis (inter
view with Richard Rettig) in Rettig,
Cancer Crusade
, 109.

185
On March 9, 1971, acting on the panel’s recommendations:
Ibid.

185
she persuaded her close friend Ann Landers:
“Mary Woodard Lasker: First Lady of Medical Research,” presentation by Neen Hunt at the National Library of Medicine, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/TL/B/B/M/P/ (accessed January 6, 2010).

185
Landers’s column appeared on April 20, 1971:
Ask Ann Landers,
Chicago Sun-Times
, April 20, 1971.

186
“I saw trucks arriving at the Senate”:
Rick Kogan,
America’s Mom: The Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers
(New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 104.

186
An exasperated secretary charged with sorting
: “Ann Landers,”
Washington Post
, May 18, 1971.

186
Stuart Symington, the senator from Missouri:
Ann Landers and Margo Howard, A Life in Letters (New York: Warner Books, 2003), 255.

186
“Cancer is not simply an island”:
Philip Lee. Also see Committee on Labor and Public Welfare Report No. 92–247, June 28, 1971, p. 43. S. 1828, 92
^nd
Cong., 1
^st
sess.

186
“An all-out effort at this time”:
Patterson,
Dread Disease
, 152.

186
James Watson, who had discovered the structure of DNA:
See James Watson, “To Fight Cancer, Know the Enemy,”
New York Times
, August 5, 2009.

186
“
Doing ‘relevant’ research”:
James Watson, “The Growing Up of Cancer Research,”
Science Year: The Book World Science Annual, 1973;
Mary Lasker Papers.

187
“In a nutshell”:
“Washington Rounds,”
Medical World News
, March 31, 1972.

187
“I suspect there is trouble ahead”:
Irvine H. Page, “The Cure of Cancer 1976,”
Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine
77, no. 3 (1971): 357–60.

187
“If Richard Milhous Nixon”:
“Tower Ticker,”
Chicago Tribune
, January 28, 1971.

187
“Don’t worry about it”:
Benno Schmidt, oral history and memoir (gift and property of Elizabeth Smith, New York).

187
In November 1971, Paul Rogers:
For details of Representative Rogers’s bill, see Rettig,
Cancer Crusade
, 250–75.

188
In December 1971, the House finally:
Iwan W. Morgan,
Nixon
(London: Arnold, 2002), 72.

188
On December 23, 1971, on a cold, windswept afternoon:
“Nixon Signs Cancer Bill; Cites Commitment to Cure,”
New York Times
, December 24, 1971.

188
$400 million for 1972:
“The National Cancer Act of 1971,” Senate Bill 1828, enacted December 23, 1871 (P.L. 92–218), National Cancer Institute, http://legislative.cancer.gov/history/phsa/1971 (accessed December 2, 2009). Frank Rauscher, the director of the National Cancer Program, estimated the real numbers to have been $233 million in 1971, $378 million in 1972, $432 million in 1973, and $500 million in 1974. Frank Rauscher, “Budget and the National Cancer Program (NCP),”
Cancer Research
34, no. 7 (1974): 1743–48.

188
If money was “frozen energy”:
Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 7, p. 185.

188
The new bill, she told a reporter, “contained nothing”:
Ibid., Part 2, Session 10, p. 334.

188
Lasker and Sidney Farber withdrew:
Ibid., Part 1, Session 7, p. 185; and Thomas Farber, interview with author, December 2007.

189
“Powerful? I don’t know”:
“Mary Lasker: Still Determined to Beautify the City and Nation,”
New York Times
, April 28, 1974.

189
“A crash program can produce only one result”: Chicago Tribune
, June 23, 1971, p. 16.

189
On March 30, 1973, in the late afternoon:
Denis R. Miller, “A Tribute to Sidney
Farber—the Father of Modern Chemotherapy,”
British Journal of Haematology
134 (2006): 20–26; “Dr. Sidney Farber, a Pioneer in Children’s Cancer Research; Won Lasker Award,”
New York Times
, March 31, 1973. Also see Mary Lasker, “A Personal Tribute to Sidney Farber, M.D. (1903–1973),”
CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians
23, no. 4 (1973): 256–57.

190
“Surely,” she wrote, “the world will never be the same”:
Lasker, “A Personal Tribute.”

PART THREE:
“WILL YOU TURN ME OUT IF I CAN’T GET BETTER?”

191
Oft expectation fails:
William Shakespeare,
All’s Well That Ends Well
(New York: Macmillan, 1912), act 2, scene 1, lines 145–47, p. 34.

191
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker:
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” lines 84–86,
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 1232.

191
You are absolutely correct:
Frank Rauscher, letter to Mary Lasker, March 18, 1974, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 118.

“In God we trust. All others [must] have data”

193
In science, ideology tends to corrupt:
“Knowledge Dethroned,”
New York Times
, September 28, 1975.

193
Orthodoxy in surgery is like orthodoxy in other departments:
G. Keynes, “Carcinoma of the Breast, the Unorthodox View,”
Proceedings of the Cardiff Medical Society
, April 1954, 40–49.

193
You mean I had a mastectomy for nothing?:
Untitled document, 1981, Rose Kushner Papers, 1953–90, Box 43, Harvard University.

194
“In my own surgical attack on carcinoma”:
Cushman Davis Haagensen,
Diseases of the Breast
(New York: Saunders, 1971), 674.

194
Halsted’s “centrifugal theory”: W. S. Halsted, “The Results of Operations for the Cure of the Cancer of Breast Performed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from June 1889 to January 1894,”
Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin
4 (1894): 497–555.

194
“To some extent,” he wrote:
Haagensen,
Diseases of the Breast
, 674.

194
“operated on cancer of the breast solely”:
D. Hayes Agnew,
The Principles and Practice of Surgery, Being a Treatise on Surgical Diseases and Injuries
, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1889), 3: 711.

194 “I do not despair of carcinoma being cured”:
Ibid.

195
at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London:
G. Keynes, “The Treatment of Primary Carcinoma of the Breast with Radium,”
Acta Radiologica
10 (1929): 393–401; G. Keynes, “The Place of Radium in the Treatment of Cancer of the Breast,”
Annals of Surgery
106 (1937): 619–30. For biographical details, see W. LeFanu, “Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982),”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
56, no. 4 (1982): 571–73.