In this conversation, Robert Winn and Otis Brawley discuss the structural biases and racism that are present in law enforcement as well as in medicine after the killing of Tyre Nichols by police.

Otis Brawley is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and co-editor of the Cancer History Project; and Robert Winn is director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and guest editor of the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.

In this episode, Brawley and Winn identify the racial and class power dynamics in American society, and why physicians and healthcare professionals have a responsibility to reflect on the problems in policing, and identify areas where these problems are also present in health care.

Brawley and Winn have had their own potentially deadly encounters with police—Brawley was thrown to the ground and held at gunpoint for standing in the garage of his own home; Winn was thrown to the ground and held at gunpoint for walking toward his own car.

A transcript of the episode is available here.

Kay Dickersin, MA, PhD, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of the early leaders of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

In this interview, Dickersin discusses her breast cancer diagnosis at age 34, and her frustration that, at the time, most support groups seemed to focus on how to fix your makeup or your wig.

Dickersin, along with Marsha Oakley, a breast cancer survivor and nurse in Baltimore, decided to start their own advocacy group called Arm-in-Arm. This group addressed the difficult aspects of treatment and produced newsletters that were lighthearted in nature. Members of Arm-in-Arm called their jokes about their circumstances whistling past the graveyard.

Then, the group received an invitation from the Breast Cancer Coalition to attend the first meeting. From there, Dickersin became one of the group’s leaders, chairing NBCC’s research task force.

Dickersin was one of the architects of Project LEAD, NBCC’s initiative to educate advocates about the science of breast cancer. In this conversation she recounts Project LEAD’s beginnings and its impact.

A transcript of the episode is available here.

Directors of the first three NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers are learning from the past, starting with the National Cancer Act, and mapping an equitable future for oncology.

On July 29, 2021, the Cancer History Project convened panelists Candace S. Johnson, president and CEO of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Craig B. Thompson, president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Peter WT Pisters, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, for a two hour Zoom session moderated by co-editor Otis W. Brawley.

A full transcript and video of the panel are available here.

Craig Jordan was one of the first researchers to analyze and describe tamoxifen’s preventive properties. His discoveries changed the face of breast cancer prevention and treatment.

His career is storied. He received the Karnofsky award for his work as the father of tamoxifen, is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, met and corresponded with Princess Diana while he led the breast cancer program at the Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center, and served in the British military as captain of the Intelligence Service while undergoing his doctoral studies.

Jordan’s book “Tamoxifen Tales,” outlines the journey of discovery which led to the enormous contribution that antiestrogens, especially tamoxifen, have made to improve treatment as well as the prevention of breast cancer.

A transcript of this conversation appears here.

Robin Scheffler is an associate professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is also the author of A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine, and a historian of the modern biological and biomedical sciences and their intersections with developments in American history.

In this episode, Scheffler overviews the history of viral oncology, beginning with the idea of cancer as a contagion.

Scheffler then delves into historical controversies surrounding the study of cancer vaccines, as well as the beginning of NCI’s viral oncology program—which received millions in funding after the signing of the National Cancer Act.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Dwight Tosh had grown so weak that he was unable to walk. Still, doctors at the rural Arkansas hospital—where he lay in bed for weeks in 1962—were unable to diagnose him.

“My athletic body had been reduced to just a shell of an individual, looked like you’d just taken the skin and stretched it over my bones, just wasn’t much left of me,” Tosh, 73, a Republican state representative in Arkansas, said to Doroshow. “And still, the doctors couldn’t figure out or diagnose what the problem was.”

Tosh, only 13 at the time, wasn’t getting any better. He was running fevers of 107 and 108, and there didn’t seem to be a solution.

“And then a huge knot came up on my neck and a biopsy of that night revealed that I had Hodgkins’s lymphoma,” he said.

Doctors told his family he had two weeks left to live, but Tosh and his parents never quite believed that.

Tosh was the 17th patient admitted to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the first patient at St. Jude to become a 60 year survivor. He spoke with Dr. Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who is also a historian of medicine and a member of the Cancer History Project editorial board.

A transcript of their conversation is available here.

In July, the Cancer History Project is focusing on the founders of cancer centers. In this conversation, Jerome Yates tells us how he helped build Vermont Cancer Center.

For Yates, a Joe Simone quote comes to his mind when reflecting on his days in Vermont:  “when you’ve seen one cancer center, you’ve seen one cancer center.”

University of Vermont received a planning grant in 1974 to develop a cancer center in Vermont at a time when funds were flowing from NCI. Yates also received a rehabilitation grant from NCI for patients with advanced cancer—which helped develop a clinical infrastructure for the future cancer center.

University of Vermont received its core grant in 1978.

Read more here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/jerry-yates-on-building-a-cancer-center-in-a-rural-environment-vermont/

This is the third installment of the Cancer History Project’s series in honor of Cancer Survivors Month. Dr. Deborah Doroshow, Cancer History Project guest editor during the month of June, conducted the following interview with Dave Boule, who was diagnosed with polycythemia vera in 2006.

Soon after Boule was diagnosed, he had a hunch that there were better treatment options than the phlebotomies his New York doctor was treating him with. Boule did his research, and stumbled upon studies written by Dr. Richard T. Silver, who is now director emeritus of the Richard T. Silver MD Myeloproliferative Neoplasms Center.

Silver’s studies demonstrated that interferon would be the best treatment for his disease. Since then, Boule has undergone successful treatment with interferon, which he still takes today.

His advice to newly diagnosed patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms: seek out a doctor who specializes in the disease.

A transcript of this episode is available here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/dave-boule-confronted-polycythemia-vera-with-an-accountants-consistency/

This is the second installment of the Cancer History Project’s series in honor of Cancer Survivors Month. Dr. Deborah Doroshow, Cancer History Project guest editor during the month of June, conducted the following interview with Beth Carner, a colon cancer patient who is now in remission.

At 25, Elizabeth Carner was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Thus began a months-long odyssey of six hour drives to Mayo Clinic, where Carner received chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

The treatments and cancer were painful and physically exhausting. At one point, she was given six weeks to live.

Then, a doctor at Mayo told Carner about a clinical trial she was a candidate for. When she arrived at the desk of Richard Goldberg, a GI oncologist, Carner was so weak she could barely hold her head up. Within 2 to 3 months of starting the drug, which would become known as Keytruda, or pembrolizumab, she could tell the drug was working.

After a year of being on the trial, doctors didn’t find any evidence of cancer. Carner remains in complete remission—eight years from when she was diagnosed.

An edited transcript of this conversation appears here.

This month, Cancer History Project guest editor Deborah Doroshow, MD, PhD is conducting several oral histories with people who have experienced cancer—in a preliminary attempt to begin to capture some of those experiences.

Although sources regarding the experiences of scientists and clinicians are often readily available, sources documenting the patient experience—a topic which historians of medicine like myself are deeply committed to elucidating—tend to be more difficult to find and are less frequently saved by archivists.

Doroshow’s first oral history is with Judy Orem, a participant on the phase I clinical trial of (Imatinib), or Gleevec.

While the story of Gleevec’s discovery and clinical testing is well known, Judy’s narrative provides a new perspective into the experience of being one of the first people to participate in a clinical trial of one of the earliest targeted therapies in hematology and oncology.

A transcript of this podcast is available here.