Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  78 Marie Curie died of leukemia: Curie's disease was diagnosed as "aplastic anemia" of rapid, feverish development, but is widely considered to have been a variant of myelodysplasia, a preleukemic syndrome that resembles aplastic anemia and progresses to a fatal leukemia.

  78 Grubbe's fingers had been amputated: Otha Linton, "Radiation Dangers," Academic Radiology 13, no. 3 (2006): 404.

  78 Willy Meyer's posthumous address: Willy Meyer, "Inoperable and Malignant Tumors," Annals of Surgery 96, no. 5 (1932): 891-92.

  Dyeing and Dying

  80 Those who have not been trained in chemistry: Michael B. Shimkin, "As Memory Serves--an Informal History of the National Cancer Institute, 1937-57," Journal of the National Cancer Institute 59 (suppl. 2) (1977): 559-600.

  80 Life is . . . a chemical incident: Martha Marquardt, Paul Ehrlich (New York: Schuman, 1951), 11. Also see Frederick H. Kasten, "Paul Ehrlich: Pathfinder in Cell Biology," Biotechnic & Histochemistry 71, no. 1 (1996).

  81 Between 1851 and 1857: Phyllis Deane and William Alan Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 210.

  81 By the 1850s, that proportion had peaked: Stanley D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry: Its Growth and Impact, 1600-1935 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1999), v-xviii.

  81 Cloth dyes had to be extracted: A. S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993), 13.

  81 ever-popular calico prints: Ibid.

  81 "half of a small but long-shaped room": William Cliffe, "The Dyemaking Works of Perkin and Sons, Some Hitherto Unrecorded Details," Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colorists 73 (1957): 313-14.

  82 In 1883, the German output of alizarin: Travis, Rainbow Makers, 195.

  83 "most impudent, ignorant, flatulent, fleshy": H. A. Colwell, "Gideon Harvey: Sidelights on Medical Life from the Restoration to the End of the XVII Century," Annals of Medical History 3, no. 3 (1921): 205-37.

  83 "None of these compounds have, as yet": "Researches Conducted in the Laboratories of the Royal College of Chemistry," Reports of the Royal College of Chemistry and Researches Conducted in the Laboratories in the Years 1845-6-7 (London: Royal College of Chemistry, 1849), liv; Travis, Rainbow Makers, 35.

  83 In 1828, a Berlin scientist named Friedrich Wohler: Friedrich Wohler, "Ueber kunstliche Bildung des Harnstoffs," Annalen der Physik und Chemie 87, no. 2 (1828): 253-56.

  84 In 1878, in Leipzig, a twenty-four-year-old: Paul Ehrlich, "Uber das Methylenblau und Seine Klinisch-Bakterioskopische Verwerthung," Zeitschrift fur Klinische Medizin 2 (1882): 710-13.

  84 In 1882, working with Robert Koch: Paul Ehrlich, "Uber die Farbung der Tuberkelbazillen," Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 8 (1882): 269.

  85 "It has occurred to me": Marquardt, Paul Ehrlich, 91.

  85 His laboratory was now physically situated: Travis, Rainbow Makers, 97.

  86 On April 19, 1910, at the densely packed: See Felix Bosch and Laia Rosich, "The Contributions of Paul Ehrlich to Pharmacology," Pharmacology (2008): 82, 171-79.

  86 "syphilis--the "secret malady": Linda E. Merians, ed., The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996). Also see Ehrlich, "A Lecture on Chemotherapeutics," Lancet, ii, 445.

  87 Ehrlich and Kaiser Wilhelm: M. Lawrence Podolsky, Cures out of Chaos: How Unexpected Discoveries Led to Breakthroughs in Medicine and Health (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997), 273.

  88 "thick, yellowish green cloud": Richard Lodois Thoumin, The First World War (New York: Putnam, 1963), 175.

  88 In 1919, a pair of American pathologists: E. B. Krumbhaar and Helen D. Krumbhaar, "The Blood and Bone Marrow in Yellow Cross Gas (Mustard Gas) Poisoning: Changes Produced in the Bone Marrow of Fatal Cases," Journal of Medical Research 40, no. 3 (1919): 497-508.

  Poisoning the Atmosphere

  89 "What if this mixture do not work at all?: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, act 4, scene 3 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1913), 229.

  89 We shall so poison the atmosphere: Robert Nisbet, "Knowledge Dethroned: Only a Few Years Ago, Scientists, Scholars and Intellectuals Had Suddenly Become the New Aristocracy. What Happened?" New York Times, September 28, 1975.

  89 Every drug, the sixteenth-century: W. Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Karger, 1982), 129-30.

  89 On December 2, 1943: D. M. Saunders, "The Bari Incident," United States Naval Institute Proceedings (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1967).

  89 Of the 617 men rescued: Guy B. Faguet, The War on Cancer: An Anatomy of Failure, A Blueprint for the Future (New York: Springer, 2005), 71.

  90 Goodman and Gilman weren't interested: Alfred Gilman, "Therapeutic Applications of Chemical Warfare Agents," Federation Proceedings 5 (1946): 285-92; Alfred Gilman and Frederick S. Philips, "The Biological Actions and Therapeutic Applications of the B-Chloroethyl Amines and Sulfides," Science 103, no. 2675 (1946): 409-15; Louis Goodman et al., "Nitrogen Mustard Therapy: Use of Methyl-Bis(Beta-Chlorethyl)amine Hydrochloride and Tris(Beta-Chloroethyl)amine Hydrochloride for Hodgkin's Disease, Lymphosarcoma, Leukemia and Certain Allied and Miscellaneous Disorders," Journal of the American Medical Association 132, no. 3 (1946): 126-32.

  91 George Hitchings had also: Grant Taylor, Pioneers in Pediatric Oncology (Houston: University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, 1990), 137. Also see Tonse N. K. Raju, "The Nobel Chronicles," Lancet 355, no. 9208 (1999): 1022; Len Goodwin, "George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion--Nobel Prizewinners," Parasitology Today 5, no. 2 (1989): 33.

  91 "Scientists in academia stood disdainfully": John Laszlo, The Cure of Childhood Leukemia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 65.

  92 Instead of sifting through mounds: Gertrude B. Elion, "Nobel Lecture in Physiology or Medicine--1988. The Purine Path to Chemotherapy," In Vitro Cellular and Developmental Biology 25, no. 4 (1989): 321-30; Gertrude B. Elion, George H. Hitchings, and Henry Vanderwerff, "Antagonists of Nucleic Acid Derivatives: VI. Purines," Journal of Biological Chemistry 192 (1951): 505. Also see Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998; reprint, 2004), 304.

  92 In the early 1950s, two physician-scientists: Joseph Burchenal, Mary L. Murphy, et al., "Clinical Evaluation of a New Antimetabolite, 6-Mercaptopurine, in the Treatment of Leukemia and Allied Diseases," Blood 8 no. 11 (1953): 965-99.

  The Goodness of Show Business

  93 The name "Jimmy" is a household word in New England: George E. Foley, The Children's Cancer Research Foundation: The House That "Jimmy" Built: The First Quarter-Century (Boston: Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, 1982).

  93 I've made a long voyage: Maxwell E. Perkins, "The Last Letter of Thomas Wolfe and the Reply to It," Harvard Library Bulletin, Autumn 1947, 278.

  94 artificial respirator known as the iron lung: Philip Drinker and Charles F. McKhann III, "The Use of a New Apparatus for the Prolonged Administration of Artificial Respiration: I. A Fatal Case of Poliomyelitis," Journal of the American Medical Association 92: 1658-60.

  94 Polio research was shaken out of its torpor: For a discussion of the early history of polio, see Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Also see Tony Gould, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

  94 Within a few weeks, 2,680,000 dimes: Kathryn Black, In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History (New York: Perseus Books, 307), 25; Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); History of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis Records; Volume II: Raising Funds to Fight Infantile Paralysis, Book 2 (March of Dimes Archives, 1957), 256-60.

  95 Please take care of my baby. Her name is Catherine: Variety, the Children's Charity, "Our History," http://www.usvariety.or
g/about_history.html (accessed November 11, 2009).

  96 "Well, I need a new microscope": Robert Cooke, Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer (New York: Random House, 2001), 115.

  96 money and netted $45,456: Foley, Children's Cancer Research Foundation (Boston: Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, 1982).

  96 Gustafson was quiet: Phyllis Clauson, interview with author, July 2009; Karen Cummins, interview with author, July 2009. Also see Foley, Children's Cancer Research Foundation.

  97 On May 22, 1948, on a warm Saturday night in the Northeast: The original broadcast recording can be accessed on the Jimmy Fund website at http://www.jimmyfund.org/abo/broad/jimmybroadcast.asp. Also see Saul Wisnia, Images of America: The Jimmy Fund of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2002), 18-19.

  99 Jimmy's mailbox was inundated: Foley, Children's Cancer Research Foundation.

  99 the Manhattan Project spent: See "The Manhattan Project, An Interactive History," U.S. Department of Energy, Office of History, 2008.

  99 In 1948, Americans spent more than $126 million: Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 212.

  The House That Jimmy Built

  101 Etymologically, patient means sufferer: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), 125.

  101 Sidney Farber's entire purpose: Medical World News, November 25, 1966.

  101 "One assistant and ten thousand mice": George E. Foley, The Children's Cancer Research Foundation: The House That "Jimmy" Built: The First Quarter-Century (Boston: Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, 1982).

  101 "Most of the doctors": Name withheld, a hospital volunteer in the 1950s to 1960s, interview with author, May 2001.

  102 In 1953, when the Braves franchise left: "Braves Move to Milwaukee; Majors' First Shift since '03," New York Times, March 19, 1953.

  102 the Jimmy Fund planned a "Welcome Home, Ted" party: "Dinner Honors Williams: Cancer Fund Receives $150,000 from $100-Plate Affair," New York Times, August 18, 1953.

  102 Funds poured in from: Foley, Children's Cancer Research Foundation.

  102 "You can take the child out of the Depression": Robin Pogrebin and Timothy L. O'Brien, "A Museum of One's Own," New York Times, December 5, 2004.

  103 "If a little girl got attached to a doll": "Medicine: On the Track," Time, January 21, 1952.

  103 "Once I discover that almost all": Jeremiah Goldstein, "Preface to My Mother's Diary," Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology 30, no. 7 (2008): 481-504.

  104 "Acute leukemia," he wrote: Sidney Farber, "Malignant Tumors of Childhood," CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians (1953): 3, 106-7.

  104 The money that he had raised: Sidney Farber letter to Mary Lasker, August 19, 1955.

  PART TWO:

  AN IMPATIENT WAR

  105 Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946), 142.

  105 The 325,000 patients with cancer: Sidney Farber, quoted in Guy B. Faguet, The War on Cancer: An Anatomy of Failure, a Blueprint for the Future (New York: Springer, 2005), 97.

  "They form a society"

  107 All of this demonstrates why: Michael B. Shimkin, "As Memory Serves--an Informal History of the National Cancer Institute, 1937-57," Journal of the National Cancer Institute 59 (suppl. 2) (1977): 559-600.

  107 I am aware of some alarm: Senator Lister Hill, "A Strong Independent Cancer Agency," October 5, 1971, Mary Lasker Papers.

  107 "Americans of all ages": Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, Penguin), 296.

  108 a woman who "could sell": Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 1, p. 3, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/laskerm/transcripts/laskerm_1_1_3.html.

  109 In 1939, Mary Woodard met Albert Lasker: Ibid., p. 56.

  109 "salesmanship in print": Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 51.

  109 they were married just fifteen months after: Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 3, p. 80.

  110 "I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer": J. Michael Bishop, "Mary Lasker and Her Prizes: An Appreciation," Journal of the American Medical Association 294, no. 11 (2005): 1418-19.

  111 "If a toothpaste": Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 7.

  111 "the fairy godmother of medical research": "The Fairy Godmother of Medical Research," BusinessWeek, July 14, 1986.

  111 In April 1943, Mary Lasker visited: Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 5, p. 136, and Session 16, pp. 477-79.

  111 The visit left her cold: Ibid., Session 16, pp. 477-79.

  111 Of its small annual budget of: Ibid. Also see Mary Lasker interview, October 23, 1984, in Walter Ross, Crusade, the Official History of the American Cancer Society (Westminster, MD: Arbor House, 1987), 33.

  111 "Doctors," she wrote, "are not administrators": Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 7, p. 183.

  112 In October 1943, Lasker persuaded a friend: Reader's Digest, October 1945.

  112 "My mother died from cancer": Letter from a soldier to Mary Lasker, 1949.

  112 Over the next months: Richard A. Rettig, Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971 (Lincoln, NE: Author's Choice Press, 1977), 21.

  112 "A two-pronged attack": Letter from Cornelius A. Wood to Mary Lasker, January 6, 1949, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 210.

  112 Albert Lasker . . . recruited Emerson Foote: Ibid.

  112 The "Lay Group": Letter from Mary Lasker to Jim Adams, May 13, 1945, Mary Lasker Papers.

  112 In a single year, it printed 9 million: these numbers are culled from letters and receipts found in the Mary Lasker Papers.

  113 "Ladies' Garden Club": Charles Cameron, Cancer Control, vol. 3, 1972.

  113 "unjustified, troublesome and aggressive": James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 173. Also see Rettig, Cancer Crusade, 22.

  113 The society's bylaws and constitution were rewritten: Letter from Frank Adair to ACS members, October 23, 1945.

  113 "The Committee should not include": Telegram from Jim Adams to Mary Lasker, 1947, Mary Lasker Papers.

  113 "You were probably the first person": Letter from Rose Kushner to Mary Lasker, July 22, 1988, Rose Kushner Papers, Harvard University.

  114 "a penicillin for cancer": "Doctor Foresees Cancer Penicillin," New York Times, October 3, 1953.

  114 By the early 1950s, she was regularly: See, for instance, letter from John R. Heller to Mary Lasker, October 15, 1948, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 119; and Memorandum on Conversation with Dr. Farber, February 24, 1952, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 76.

  114 "scientific treatises": Letter from Sidney Farber to Mary Lasker, August 19, 1955, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 170.

  114 "An organizational pattern is developing": Ibid.

  115 a "regular on the Hill": Robert Mayer, interview with author, July 2008.

  115 "Put a tambourine in [his] hands": Rettig, Cancer Crusade, 26.

  115 "I have written to you so many times": Letter from Sidney Farber to Mary Lasker, September 5, 1958.

  "These new friends of chemotherapy"

  116 The death of a man: Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (New York: Ecco, 2001), 431.

  116 I had recently begun to notice: K. E. Studer and Daryl E. Chubin, The Cancer Mission: Social Contexts of Biomedical Research (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1980).

  116 By February 1952, Albert was confined: Mary Lasker Oral History Project, Part 1, Session 9, p. 260.

  116 "It seems a little unfair": Letter from Lowel Cogeshall to Mary Lasker, March 11, 1952, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 76.

  117 Albert Lasker died at eight o'clock: "A. D. Lasker Dies; Philanthropist, 72,"
New York Times, May 31, 1952.

  117 "We are at war with an insidious": Senator Lister Hill, "A Strong Independent Cancer Agency," October 5, 1971, Mary Lasker Papers, Columbia University.

  119 "University professors who are opposed": "Science and the Bomb," New York Times, August 7, 1945.

  120 Science the Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Science the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1945).

  121 The National Science Foundation (NSF), founded in 1950: Daniel S. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 167.

  121 "long term, basic scientific research": Ibid., 419.

  121 "so great a co-ordination of medical scientific labor": Stephen Parks Strickland, Politics, Science, and the Dread Disease: A Short History of the United States Medical Research Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 16.

  121 "Should I refuse my dinner": Ernest E. Sellers, "Early Pragmatists," Science 154, no. 3757 (1996): 1604.

  121 The outspoken Philadelphia pathologist Stanley Reimann: Stanley Reimann, "The Cancer Problem as It Stands Today," Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 13 (1945): 21.

  122 the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center: C. G. Zubrod et al., "The Chemotherapy Program of the National Cancer Center Institute: History, Analysis, and Plans," Cancer Chemotherapy Reports 50 (1966): 349-540; V. T. DeVita, "The Evolution of Therapeutic Research in Cancer," New England Journal of Medicine 298 (1978): 907-10.

  122 Farber was ecstatic, but impatient: Letter from Sidney Farber to Mary Lasker, August 19, 1955, Mary Lasker Papers, Box 170.

  122 One such antibiotic came from a rod-shaped microbe: Selman Waksman and H. B. Woodruff, "Bacteriostatic and Bacteriocidal Substances Produced by a Soil Actinomyces," Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine 45 (1940): 609.

  122 Farber and actinomycin D: Sidney Farber, Giulio D'Angio, Audrey Evans, and Anna Mitus, "Clinical Studies of Actinomycin D with Special Reference to Wilms' Tumor in Children," Annals of the New York Academy of Science 89 (1960): 421-25.