The Cancer History Project

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.

Jim Allison hadn’t been back to his hometown of Alice, TX, in 40 years when Bill Haney asked him to return there during the filming of “Jim Allison: Breakthrough.”

“I think, as is often the case with people who I make films with—it’s a voyage for discovery for them too,” said Haney, director, writer, and a producer of the documentary. “I think that Jim walking the streets where he was as a child, and where his brothers lived, and the school that he had been in, and the challenges he had at the school… reconnecting to it, it turned out, I think, to give Jim something, as well as I hope, the viewers something.”

Haney is a filmmaker, inventor, and entrepreneur.

Jim Allison’s personal connection to cancer, in losing his mother to lymphoma when he was young, as well as a brother to prostate cancer—a disease Allison has also survived—made the scientific aspects of “Jim Allison: Breakthrough” shine, Haney said.

“That determined individuality­—and in Jim’s case with a sparkle of fun—creates a character that you can spend a lot of time with in Breakthrough,” he said. “That you feel a sense of care and you feel empathy not only for, but you feel empathy from. And so, I don’t think we could have made Breakthrough without Jim and I don’t think we would’ve wanted to.”

Why film a documentary about the development of immunotherapy in cancer?

“At a time when there’s a lot of pessimism about global climate change and income inequality, and immigration challenges, and the nature of democracy in America, for goodness sakes, here’s a really optimistic tale, where something we’ve been trying for 5,000 years to work on we’ve been succeeding,” Haney said.

There aren’t many documentaries about Nobel-winning scientists out there, Haney said.

“I think part of the reason for that is, where do you pitch the science? If you ask Jim—just make it a little simpler—he goes from genius to post doc with 12 years of experience,” Haney said.

Jim Allison helped make “Jim Allison: Breakthrough” work, in part, because he wasn’t concerned with his image on camera, and came across very naturally throughout filming.

“I’ve filmed a lot of folks, and some fantastic people, when the camera shows up, they freeze, they’re not emotionally open, they’re not comfortable in a conversation,” Haney said. “We need to have a journey of common humanity, and, and so when we really decided we were going to stick with this was after we filmed him for the first two, three days.”

On the day Bill Haney wrapped up filming of Jim: Allison: Breakthrough, it was announced that Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize.

“That made us want to accelerate finishing the films, including going to Stockholm and putting this thing in. We made the movie in about a year and that’s a fast schedule for a [documentary], especially for somebody like me, who’s got a couple of other jobs,” Haney said. “We are really happy that we were the number one film on PBS last year in terms of viewers, and I think that’s a good example where Jim winning the Nobel helped. It didn’t change the filmmaking, but it probably changed the footprint of the film.”

Read the transcript here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/bill-haney-making-of-jim-allison-breakthrough/

In a panel moderated by Dr. Karen Knudsen, CEO of American Cancer Society, four leaders in oncology proposed an action plan for tackling cancer health disparities and creating health equity.

The panel includes Clifford A. Hudis, CEO, American Society of Clinical Oncology; Executive vice chair, Conquer Cancer Foundation; Chair, CancerLinQ; Chanita Hughes Halbert, Vice chair for research, professor, Department of Population and Public Health Sciences; Associate director for cancer equity, Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Southern California; Amy E. Leader, Associate professor of population science and medical oncology, associate director of community integration, Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center; Public health teaching faculty, College of Population Health, Thomas Jefferson University; Cheryl Willman, Executive director, Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs (nationally and globally); Director, Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A transcript of this panel is available here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/experts-propose-action-plan-on-health-equity-panel/

In a panel moderated by Dr. Narjust Duma, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, four directors of NCI-designated Cancer Centers discuss their unique perspectives as immigrants—and leaders in oncology. Topics cover their unique pathways to leadership, diversity in medicine, and challenges faced by international medical graduates.

The panel included Dr. Kunle Odunsi, director of University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center; Dr. Peter Pisters, president of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Dr. Leonidas Platanias, director of Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University; and Dr. Cornelia Ulrich, executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute.

A transcript of this panel is available here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/international-perspectives-in-u-s-cancer-center-leadership/

Register for our upcoming panel on May 9, “Health equity: Advocacy and access in the community.” https://www.eventbrite.com/e/health-equity-advocacy-and-access-tickets-324240541187

Jerome Yates became a cancer doctor during a time when medical oncologists were thought to be what he describes as “the garbage collectors of medicine.”

“The attitude among physician colleagues was, why are you wasting your time doing this? Not only are you wasting your time, but you’re making the patients sicker,” said Yates, 85, a retired oncologist who has practiced and administered research at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Vermont, NCI and the American Cancer Society.  “Some of them get very sick from the chemotherapy, because there are a lot of side effects with the normal tissues.” 

During his internship at San Bernardino County Hospital, Yates, then 29, encountered a metastatic testicular cancer patient around his age. The young man was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure. 

“They were going to let him die,” Yates said to The Cancer Letter. “I said, ‘If he came in and you didn’t know that he had metastatic cancer, you would treat him for his congestive heart failure.’ I convinced the attending. We treated him, and it bought him another four or five months. I thought it was an important four or five months.”  

The prevailing attitude toward cancer treatment was depressing—“That if somebody had metastatic disease, had cancer spread around the body, that they were going to die, and why would you want to prolong their agony?”

In 1965, Yates encountered an optimistic article, “​​Obstacles to the Control of Acute Leukemia” in the CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians, written by James Holland, an oncologist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Center.  

“He said that they were on the pathway to cure acute leukemia. The way it was structured, and the timing—I was taking care of some chronically ill patients—and it just sounded like it was exciting,” he said. 

Yates joined Holland at Roswell Park in 1968 and began conducting clinical trials with members of the cooperative group Acute Leukemia Group B cooperative group, the ALGB. This group, renamed the Cancer and Leukemia Group B in 1976, conducted clinical trials using two, three, or four-drug combinations. This strategy was not received kindly by the mainstream medical community. 

“There was a general attitude that we not only didn’t know what we were doing, but what we were doing was potentially harmful to many patients,” Yates said.  

Rather than embrace the work of the ALGB, cancer doctors largely adopted the thinking of William Dameshek, an influential hematologist at Harvard who was a mentor to many oncologists. 

“His attitude was that we were poison pushers, that we were cowboys, that we were doing things that weren’t in the best interest of the patient,” Yates said. “Because he was extremely influential, we were viewed as outliers.”

Still, Yates remained hopeful—“because, as a physician, taking care of these patients—it made you feel good.”

Yates spoke with Alexandria Carolan, an associate editor with the Cancer History Project and reporter with The Cancer Letter. A full transcript appears here.