Oncology Research Quotes

A landmark 2010 study from the Massachusetts General Hospital had even more startling findings. The researchers randomly assigned 151 patients with stage IV lung cancer, like Sara’s, to one of two possible approaches to treatment. Half received usual oncology care. The other half received usual oncology care plus parallel visits with a palliative care specialist. These are specialists in preventing and relieving the suffering of patients, and to see one, no determination of whether they are dying or not is required. If a person has serious, complex illness, palliative specialists are happy to help. The ones in the study discussed with the patients their goals and priorities for if and when their condition worsened. The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality.

Things changed after that between me and Mark. I stopped being mortified that people might mistake me for one of his acolytes. I was his Boswell, don’t you know. I interviewed him about his childhood—his father was a psychiarist in Beverly Hills. I cataloged the contents of his van. I followed him around at work, sitting in while he examined patients. He had been a bit of a prodigy when we were in college. After his father developed a tumor, Mark, who was pre-med, started studying cancer with an intensity that convinced many of his friends that his goal was to find a cure in time to save his father. As it turned out, his father didn’t have cancer. But Mark kept on with his cancer studies. His interest was not in fact in oncology—in finding a cure—but in cancer education and prevention. By the time he entered medical school, he had created, with another student, a series of college courses on cancer and coauthored The Biology of Cancer Sourcebook, the text for a course that was eventually offered to tens of thousands of students. He cowrote a second book, Understanding Cancer, that became a bestselling university text, and he continued to lecture throughout the United States on cancer research, education, and prevention. “The funny thing is, I’m not really interested in cancer,” Mark told me. “I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and suvivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface.” Mark clawed at the air with his arms. What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.

One day, sitting at the dining table, I opened one and started reading. It talked about Michael’s contributions to research into childhood leukemia. His position as head of hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. His work as a lead investigator with the international pediatric oncology group. The writer talked about loss and grief and offered heartfelt condolence. It was from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Secretary Clinton, in the last stages of a bruising brutal campaign for the most powerful job in the world, took time out to write to me. A woman she’d never met. About a man she’d never met. A Canadian who couldn’t even vote for her. It was a private note, not meant to help her in any way, but offering comfort to a stranger in profound grief.

I save him my diatribe about people with bullshit EdDs and PsyDs that I’ve run into in academia who couldn’t pass a fifth-grade science exam all insisting that they be addressed with the same reverence as the head of oncology at a research hospital.

whether to become a professor or join a pharmaceutical company. He’d grown frustrated doing experiments simply as an academic exercise. Molecules that he and his fellow researchers had synthesized would be thrown away without being tested for any potential application, the sole goal being to prove that the structure they’d created was the one they’d intended to create. “I always protested,” he recalled. “Wouldn’t it be nice to synthesize something that could be [useful]?” After all, that was what he’d loved about chemistry in the first place: You make something. Just as Lydon had gravitated toward the practicality of kinase research, Zimmermann wanted to be in a place where he could put that urge for application to good use. He opted to return to Ciba-Geigy, joining the oncology group. Alex Matter opened Zimmermann’s

1. GROWTH HORMONES IN MEAT When you eat conventional meat, you’re probably eating hormones, antibiotics, steroids, and chemicals created by the fear and stress suffered by the animal during slaughter and in its inhumane living conditions. In 2009, two Japanese researchers published a startling study in Annals of Oncology. They pointed out that there has been a surge in hormone-dependent cancers that roughly parallels the surge of beef consumption in Japan. Over the last twenty-five years, hormone-dependent cancers such as breast, ovarian, endometrial, and prostate cancer rose fivefold in that country. More than 25 percent of the beef imported to Japan comes from the United States, where livestock growers regularly use the growth hormonal steroid estradiol. The researchers found that US beef had much higher levels of estrogen than Japanese beef because of the added hormones. This finding led them to conclude that eating a lot of estrogen-rich beef could be the reason for the rising incidence of these life-threatening cancers. Injected hormones like estrogen mimic the activity of our natural hormones and prevent those hormones from doing their jobs. This situation creates chaos. Growth hormones may alter the way in which natural hormones are produced, eliminated, or metabolized. And guess what? Hormone impersonators can trigger unnatural cell growth that may develop into cancer. The United States is one of the only industrialized countries that still allows their animals to be injected with growth hormone. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and the entire European Union have banned rBGH and rBST because of their dangerous impact on human and bovine health. US farmers fatten up their livestock by injecting them with estrogen-based hormones, which can migrate from the meat we eat to our bodies—and possibly stimulate the growth of human breast cancer, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, an organization committed to preventing breast cancer by

It could have easily been a formula for disaster-but it worked. Right from the start, the two Emils found that they shared a deep intellectual divide that ran through the front lines of oncology: the rift between overmoderated causation and bold experimentation. Each time Freireich pushed too hard on one end of the experimental fulcrum-often bringing himself and his patients to the brink of disaster-Frei pushed back to ensure that the novel, quixotic, and often deeply toxic therapies were mitigated by causation. Frei and Freireich's battles soon became emblematic of the tussles within the NCI. "Frei's job," one researcher recalled, "in those days was to keep Freireich from getting in trouble.

In moments like this, my prosperity friends from all my years of research know me best. If poked and prodded they would probably agree with me that, while heaven is great, it is even better when it is enjoyed here on earth. Technically, this is all heresy. It's called an "overrealized eschatology," an exaggerated sense of what earth can reveal about the Kingdom of God. The famous Reverend Ike, pioneer of black televangelism, used to say it with a cheeky smile: "Don't wait for your pie in the sky by and by; have it now with ice cream and a cherry on top!" But I don't want ice cream, I want a world where there is no need for pediatric oncology, UNICEF, military budgets, or suicide rails on the top floors of tall buildings. The world would drip with mercy. Thy kingdom come, I pray and my heart aches. And my tongue trips over the rest. Thy will be done.

We were asked (a) how much money had been spent (wasted) on the research and (b) whether we wouldn’t be better doing something useful (like curing cancer). I replied that the entire cost of the research—the £6.99 spent on a bottle of wine while we came up with the hypothesis—had been self-funded, and that my coauthor and I were computer scientists with very limited understanding of oncology, so it was probably best if we stayed away from interfering with anyone suffering from cancer. We didn’t hear back.

We should not be aiming for weeks of improved survival. Our goals should be higher. The public needs to see how far we have drifted from the original aims as oncologists and researchers and at what cost to the patient.

The vast majority of researchers are studying diseases they never see, in animals who don’t get them spontaneously, or in test tubes where the “cancer” must be artificially created and maintained.

I cannot stress this enough times; scientists need to stop making more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits. No one, however, willingly surrenders their pet projects, no matter how far they have drifted from the original intent, as long as they can maintain their grip on grants and power.

A landmark 2010 study from the Massachusetts General Hospital had even more startling findings. The researchers randomly assigned 151 patients with stage IV lung cancer, like Sara’s, to one of two possible approaches to treatment. Half received usual oncology care. The other half received usual oncology care plus parallel visits with a palliative care specialist. These are specialists in preventing and relieving the suffering of patients, and to see one, no determination of whether they are dying or not is required. If a person has serious, complex illness, palliative specialists are happy to help. The ones in the study discussed with the patients their goals and priorities for if and when their condition worsened. The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.