The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (102 page)

294
In the winter of 1963, three men set out:
Sam Shapiro, Philip Strax, and Louis Venet, “Evaluation of Periodic Breast Cancer Screening with Mammography: Methodology and Early Observations,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
195, no. 9 (1966): 731–38.

294
By the mid-1950s, a triad of forces:
Thomas A. Hirschl and Tim B. Heaton, eds.,
New
York State in the 21
^st
Century
(Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 144.

294
By the early 1960s, the plan had enrolled:
See, for instance, Philip Strax, “Screening for breast cancer,”
Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology
20, no. 4 (1977): 781–802.

295
Strax and Venet eventually outfitted a mobile van:
Philip Strax, “Female Cancer Detection Mobile Unit,”
Preventive Medicine
1, no. 3 (1972): 422–25.

295
“Interview . . . 5 stations X 12 women”:
Abraham Schiff quoted in Philip Strax,
Control of Breast Cancer through Mass Screening
(Philadelphia: Mosby, 1979), 148.

296
In 1971, eight years after the study:
S. Shapiro et al., “Proceedings: Changes in 5-Year Breast Cancer Mortality in a Breast Cancer Screening Program,”
Proceedings of the National Cancer Conference
7 (1972): 663–78.

296
“The radiologist,” he wrote:
Philip Strax, “Radiologist’s Role in Screening Mammography,” unpublished document quoted in Barron H. Lerner, “‘To See Today with the Eyes of Tomorrow’: A History of Screening Mammography,”
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History
20, no. 2 (2003): 299–321.

296
“Within 5 years, mammography has moved”:
G. Melvin Stevens and John F. Weigen, “Mammography Survey for Breast Cancer Detection. A 2-Year Study of 1,223 Clinically Negative Asymptomatic Women over 40,”
Cancer
19, no. 1 (2006): 51–59.

296
“The time has come”:
Arthur I. Holleb, “Toward Better Control of Breast Cancer,” American Cancer Society press release, October 4, 1971 (New York: ACS Media Division), Folder: Breast Cancer Facts, quoted in Lerner, “‘To See Today with the Eyes of Tomorrow.’”

296
the Breast Cancer Detection and Demonstration Project:
Myles P. Cunningham, “The Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Project 25 Years Later,”
CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians
47, no. 3 (1997): 131–33.

298
Between 1976 and 1992, enormous parallel trials:
See below for particular studies. Also see Madelon Finkel, ed.,
Understanding the Mammography Controversy
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 101–5.

298
In Canada, meanwhile, researchers lurched:
A. B. Miller, G. R. Howe, and C. Wall, “The National Study of Breast Cancer Screening Protocol for a Canadian Randomized Controlled Trial of Screening for Breast Cancer in Women,”
Clinical Investigative Medicine
4, nos. 3–4 (1981): 227–58.

298
Edinburgh was a disaster:
A. Huggins et al., “Edinburgh Trial of Screening for Breast Cancer: Mortality at Seven Years,”
Lancet
335, no. 8684 (1990): 241–46; Denise Donovan et al., “Edinburgh Trial of Screening for Breast Cancer,”
Lancet
335, no. 8695 (1990): 968–69.

298
The Canadian trial, meanwhile:
Miller, Howe, and Wall, “National Study of Breast Cancer Screening Protocol.”

298
For a critical evaluation of the CNBSS, HIP, and Swedish studies, see David Freedman et al., “On the Efficacy of Screening for Breast Cancer,”
International Journal of Epidemiology
33, no. 1 (2004): 43–5.

298
Randomization problems in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: Curtis J. Mettlin and Charles R. Smart, “The Canadian National Breast Screening Study: An Appraisal and Implications for Early Detection Policy,”
Cancer
72, no. S4 (1993): 1461–65; John C. Bailar III and Brian MacMahon, “Randomization in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: A Review for Evidence of Subversion,”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
156, no. 2 (1997): 193–99.

299
“Suspicion, like beauty”:
Cornelia Baines,
Canadian Medical Association Journal
157
(August 1, 1997): 249.

299
“One lesson is clear”:
Norman F. Boyd, “The Review of Randomization in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study: Is the Debate Over?”
Canadian Medical Association Journal
156, no. 2 (1997): 207–9.

300
Migration into and out of the city:
See, for instance,
Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology
30 (1995): 33–43.

300
In 1976, forty-two thousand women enrolled:
Ingvar Andersson et al., “Mammographic Screening and Mortality from Breast Cancer: The Malmö Mammographic Screening Trial,”
British Medical Journal
297, no. 6654 (1988): 943–48.

300
“There was only one”:
Ingvar Andersson, interview with author, March 2010.

300
In 1988, at the end of its twelfth year:
Andersson et al., “Mammographic Screening and Mortality.” Also Andersson, interview with author.

300
When the groups were analyzed by age:
Ibid.

301
In 2002, twenty-six years after the launch of the original:
Lennarth Nystöm et al., “Long-Term Effects of Mammography Screening: Updated Overview of the Swedish Randomised Trials,”
Lancet
359, no. 9310 (2002): 909–19.

301
Its effects, as the statistician Donald Berry describes it:
Donald Berry, interview with author, November 2009.

301
Berry wrote, “Screening is a lottery”:
“Mammograms Before 50 a Waste of Time,”
Science a Go Go
, October 12, 1998, http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/ 19980912094305data_trunc_sys.shtml (accessed December 29, 2009).

302
“This is a textbook example”:
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Picture Problem: Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking,”
New Yorker
, December 13, 2004.

303
“All photographs are accurate”:
Richard Avedon,
An Autobiography
(New York: Random House, 1993); Richard Avedon,
Evidence, 1944–1994
(New York: Random House, 1994).

304
“As the decade ended,” Bruce Chabner:
Bruce Chabner, interview with author, August 2009.

STAMP

305
Then did I beat them:
2 Samuel 22:43 (King James Version).

306
Cancer therapy is like beating the dog:
Anna Deveare Smith,
Let Me Down Easy
, script and monologue, December 2009.

306
“If a man die”:
William Carlos Williams,
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939–1962
(New York: New Directions Publishing, 1991), 2: 334.

306
In his poignant memoir of his mother’s illness:
David Rieff,
Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 6–10.

306
“Like so many doctors”:
Ibid., 8.

308
“To say this was a time of unreal”:
Abraham Verghese,
My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 24.

308
“There seemed to be little that medicine could not do”:
Ibid., 24.

309
E. Donnall Thomas, had shown that bone marrow:
E. Donnall Thomas, “Bone Marrow Transplantation from the Personal Viewpoint,”
International Journal of Hematology
81 (2005): 89–93.

309
In Thomas’s initial trial at Seattle
: E. Thomas et al., “Bone Marrow Transplantation,”
New England Journal of Medicine
292, no. 16 (1975): 832–43.

310
“We have a cure for breast cancer”:
Craig Henderson, interview with Richard Rettig, quoted in Richard Rettig et al.,
False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29.

311
“It was an intensely competitive place”:
Robert Mayer, interview with author, July 2008.

311
In 1982, Frei recruited William Peters:
Shannon Brownlee, “Bad Science and Breast Cancer,”
Discover
, August 2002.

311
In the fall of 1983, he invited Howard Skipper:
William Peters, interview with author, May 2009.

312
a “seminal event”:
Ibid.

312
George Canellos, for one, was wary:
George Canellos, interview with author, March 2008.

312
“We were going to swing and go for the ring”:
Brownlee, “Bad Science and Breast Cancer.”

312
The first patient to “change history” with STAMP:
Ibid., and Peters, interview with author.

313
“The ultimate trial of chemotherapeutic intensification”:
Peters, interview with author.

314
“Suddenly, everything broke loose”:
Ibid.

314
The woman was thirty-six years old:
Ibid.

314
“the most beautiful remission you could have imagined”:
Ibid.

315
In March 1981, in the journal
Lancet: Kenneth B. Hymes et al., “Kaposi’s Sarcoma in Homosexual Men—a Report of Eight Cases,”
Lancet
318, no. 8247 (1981): 598–600.

316
“
gay compromise syndrome”:
Robert O. Brennan and David T. Durack, “Gay Compromise Syndrome,”
Lancet
318, no. 8259 (1981): 1338–39.

316
In July 1982, with an understanding of the cause:
“July 27, 1982: A Name for the Plague,”
Time
, March 30, 2003.

316
In a trenchant essay written as a reply:
Susan Sontag,
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
(New York: Picador, 1990).

317
For Volberding, and for many of his earliest:
See ACT UP Oral History Project, http://www.actuporalhistory.org/.

317
Volberding borrowed something more ineffable:
Arthur J. Amman et al.,
The AIDS Epidemic in San Francisco: The Medical Response, 1981–1884
, vol. 3 (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1997).

317
“What we did here”:
Ibid.

318
In January 1982, as AIDS cases boomed:
“Building Blocks in the Battle on AIDS,”
New York Times
, March 30, 1997; Randy Shilts,
And the Band Played On
(New York: St. Martin’s Press).

318
In January 1983, Luc Montagnier’s group:
Shilts,
And the Band Played On
, 219; F. Barré-Sinoussi et al. “Isolation of a T-Lymphotropic Retrovirus from a Patient at Risk for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS),”
Science
220, no. 4599 (1983): 868–71.

318
Gallo also found a retrovirus:
Mikulas Popovic et al., “Detection, Isolation, and Continuous Production of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and Pre-AIDS,”
Science
224, no. 4648 (1984): 497–500; Robert C. Gallo et al., “Frequent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS,”
Science
224, no. 4648 (1984): 500–503.

318
On April 23, 1984, Margaret Heckler:
James Kinsella,
Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media
(Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 84.

318
In the spring of 1987:
Steven Epstein,
Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 219.

318
“genocide by neglect”:
Ibid., 221.

318
“Many of us who live in daily terror”:
“The F.D.A.’s Callous Response to AIDS,”
New York Times
, March 23, 1987.

318
“Drugs into bodies”:
Raymond A. Smith and Patricia D. Siplon,
Drugs into Bodies: Global AIDS Treatment Activism
(Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).

318
“The FDA is fucked-up”:
“Acting Up: March 10, 1987,”
Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
, ed. Josh Gottheimer (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 392.

318
“Double-blind studies”:
“F.D.A.’s Callous Response to AIDS,”
New York Times.

318
He concluded, “AIDS sufferers”:
Ibid.

320
By the winter of 1984, thirty-two women:
Peters, interview with author.

320
“There was so much excitement within the cancer community”:
Donald Berry, interview with author, November 2009.

320
Peters flew up from Duke to Boston:
Peters, interview with author.

The Map and the Parachute

321
Oedipus: What is the rite of purification?:
Sophocles,
Oedipus the King
.

321
Transplanters, as one oncologist:
Craig Henderson, quoted in Brownlee, “Bad Science and Breast Cancer.”

321
Nelene Fox and bone marrow transplantation: See Michael S. Lief and Harry M. Caldwell,
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Closing Arguments that Changed the Way We Live, from Protecting Free Speech to Winning Women’s Sufferage to Defending the Right to Die
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 299–354; “$89 Million Awarded Family Who Sued H.M.O.,”
New York Times
, December 30, 1993.

322
On June 19, a retinue:
Lief and Caldwell,
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
, 310.