Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
- At Yale, the first institution to test chemotherapy in humans in the modern era, the chemotherapist Paul Calabresi, a distinguished professor and founding father in the field, was forced to leave because he was involved in too much early testing of new anticancer drugs, an exercise as unpopular with the faculty and house staff at Yale as it was at Columbia.
At the Clinical Center of the NCI, where so many of the early breakthroughs with chemotherapy occurred, the well-known hematologist George Brecher, who read all the bone marrow slides of the leukemic patients, routinely referred to the Leukemia Service as the “butcher shop” at rounds.
And these are only the stories that can be told. It took plain old courage to be a chemotherapist in the 1960s and certainly the courage of the conviction that cancer would eventually succumb to drugs. Clearly, proof was necessary, and that proof would come in the form of the cure of patients with childhood acute leukemia and in adults with advanced Hodgkin’s disease.