All language subtitles for PBS.Cancer.The.Emperor.of.All.Maladies.1of3.Magic.Bullets.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

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And by cancer treatment
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By Siemens, a heritage of innovation,

a passion for life.

By David H. Koch.

By Bristol-Myers Squibb,

committed to the science
of immuno-oncology.

By the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program

to enhance public understanding
of science, technology,

and economics.

By the Kovler Fund,

pursuing solutions for
America's neglected needs.

By the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

And by the American Association
for Cancer Research.

By American Cancer Society.

By the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

By the Entertainment Industry Foundation.

By Stand Up To Cancer.

By the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting

and by the generous contributions

to this PBS station
from viewers like you.

MAN: I truthfully don't
remember the drive itself.

[SIREN]

It's kind of surreal.

You just don't believe that it's
happening to your child.

Whaa!

MAN: You know, of course
you think the worst.

I mean, anytime you hear
"spontaneous bleeding,"

and, you know, you can't take her

to the normal hospital that you would go,

you need to take her to a special place,

you don't know what to expect.

WOMAN: Something was wrong
with my daughter,

and I was scared.

She was not the normal, happy,

running-around-playing girl.

Every thought went through
your mind like, uh...

Why?

Why is this happening?

Want to go night-night, Livy?

You want to say night-night?

MAN: It's your new reality. You know?

Your... your child...

Your child...

Has cancer.

Someday, I hope,
and I'm going to pray for,

we will find a cure for cancer,

and I want it done in my time.

The time has come in America

when the same kind of concentrated effort

that split the atom
and took man to the moon

should be turned toward
conquering this dread disease.

In fact, it is now conceivable that

our children's children
will know the term cancer

only as a constellation of stars.

For the first time in human history,

we can say with some
measure of confidence

that the war on cancer is winnable.

We will launch a new effort
to conquer a disease

that has touched the life
of nearly every American,

including me, by seeking a
cure for cancer in our time.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: Cancer is a worldwide scourge,

the fastest-growing disease on earth.

By 2030, there will be

as many as 22 million cases worldwide.

Cancer afflicts 1.7 million
Americans each year

and kills 600,000 of them.

More will die from cancer
over the next two years

than died in combat in all the wars

the United States has
ever fought... combined.

One in two American men
and one in three American women

will be diagnosed with
cancer in their lifetimes,

and nearly everyone will
be close to someone

who suffers from it.

Make no mistake, this is one of

the most significant human
challenges in our history.

To imagine that we will find
a simple solution to this,

I think doesn't do service

to the true complexity of the problem.

Cancer is part of our
genetic inheritance.

We will always have cancer amidst us,

within us, amongst us.

NARRATOR: Cancer is not one disease.

It's many.

But each of them begins in the same way...

With the uncontrolled
growth of a single cell.

It attacks the blood,
the breasts, the lungs,

and every other part of the body.

No one is immune to cancer,
neither young nor old,

rich nor poor, frail nor strong.

WOMAN: Cancer wants to live

at the expense of your entire body

and your entire being.

It doesn't care about you.

It doesn't care if you're
a mother or a husband

or a daughter or, you know,

if you have 4 children.

It doesn't care. It just
cares about itself.

ANIMATION: This is a struggle
of life and death,

and we cannot win if we're afraid.

NARRATOR: But human beings
have refused to surrender,

have always struggled to understand it.

Was it god's curse?

Could you cut it out?

Could you burn it?

Could you poison it?

Was it a virus?

Did it come from the outside,

or did the enemy lie within us?

In the ongoing struggle
to conquer cancer,

massive force has sometimes meant defeat.

WOMAN: So this will be your last cycle.

Tragic failure has led
to remarkable success,

and final victory always
seems just out of reach.

The struggle has reflected every
human strength and frailty...

Resilience and terror,

candor and denial,

arrogance and caring...

You're doing good.

Blind allegiance and leaps of faith,

hubris and hype

and genuine hope.

Cancer has been called many things...

"The king of terrors,"

"a hidden assassin,"

and "the emperor of all maladies."

Cancer has taken on this
larger-than-life role

in our culture, in our lives.

It is the word that we relate to

with simultaneous terror
and some humility.

It makes us resistance workers.

It makes us historians of that empire.

It makes us people who grieve

about what happens when
this invades our lives.

It makes us soldiers.

But every year has brought
a kind of clarity

to our understanding of what
goes wrong in a cancer cell

and what can be targeted,

can be prevented, can be treated.

MAN: Every field in medicine
has had a moment in history

that has been transforming,

the moment where the knowledge
that was required

to change the field became available.

[PEOPLE CHEER]

And my prediction is
that the next 20 years

is going to be the age
of discovery for cancer

and the age for new therapies.

This is our time.

NARRATOR: In the winter of 1947,

a 3-year-old boy dying
from leukemia arrived

at children's hospital
in Boston, Massachusetts.

MUKHERJEE: He's pale, he's limping,

and he has a gigantic spleen.

His spleen is so big that
the child can hardly walk,

and it's full of cancer cells.

NARRATOR: The boy's name
was Robert Sandler.

He'd been born to a working-class family

in nearby Dorchester.

Robert had an identical
twin named Elliot.

MAN: Being a duplicate, being a twin,

and being your only friend,

you realize quickly
when things aren't right.

In the early years, probably 1947,

we lived on Blue Hill Avenue.

That was a hustle-bustle time.

[BELL CLANGING]

The trolley ran right
in front of our house,

and at night, we could stand
by the living room window

and watch the trolley sparks
come from the wires.

We could hear the animals
from Franklin park zoo,

if the wind blew just right.

We went everywhere...
We did everything together.

That's what twins do.

I got sick, he got sick;

What was different, though,
was I got better and he didn't.

NARRATOR: Even among cancers,

the disease that was
ravaging Robert Sandler's body

stood out for its horror.

Leukemia is cancer of the blood...

The disease in liquid form,

rapidly proliferating
abnormal white blood cells

that crowd out healthy blood cells,

ultimately leading to hemorrhage,

infection, and death.

Like other hospitals,
Boston Children's had

a special ward for leukemic children.

Once consigned there, they rarely left.

MAN: When we made ward rounds,
someone would say, "leukemia,"

and that would be the signal

to shake your head "too bad" and move on.

I remember one child, girl,

she looked at me...
"I'm dying, I'm dying."

"Can't you save me, Dr. Pinkel?

Can't you save me?"

SANDLER: Those wards were not nice.

There was a very narrow hallway,

and there were rooms to
the left and the right.

The air was tinted with
the smell of ether.

It was tinted with blood.

You had kids crying,

the parents standing on the
sides by the walls, crying.

It was not someplace that you'd
want your loved one to be,

not a place you'd want to be.

I remember turning a corner,
and my brother was in a crib,

and he was crying like crazy,

and I can remember putting
my hand out to him.

I was able to somehow
keep him from crying more.

He stopped.

NARRATOR: At Boston Children's,

Robert was put under the care

of a tall, imposing 44-year-old doctor

named Sidney Farber.

As the 3-year-old spiraled toward death,

Farber proposed a last-ditch
attempt to save his life...

To poison the cancer

by injecting the boy with
a drug called Aminopterin.

But the idea of injecting children

with a rare, experimental drug

was deeply alarming
to Farber's colleagues.

MUKHERJEE: People would say to Farber,

"why aren't you letting
these children die in peace?

"Why are you performing experiments

"which are going to be futile anyway?

Everyone knows that a chemical
can't cure cancer."

NARRATOR: Farber was determined
to go ahead anyway,

desperate to save the lives
of Robert Sandler

and the other children
whose treatment he oversaw.

DAVID NATHAN: If you want
to talk about dread,

Sidney Farber absolutely
dreaded leukemia.

That's because he did the
autopsies on these children,

and every single one of them died.

They usually died in about 3 months,

an inexorable death

about which nothing could be done.

NARRATOR: Though doctors
elsewhere had experimented

with chemical cures, Farber was
the first to try Aminopterin,

a rare and possibly dangerous compound

that starved white blood cells
of crucial nutrients.

On December 28, 1947,

with the reluctant assent
of the hospital board,

Farber injected Robert Sandler
with Aminopterin.

No one, not even Farber himself,
knew what would happen.

MUKHERJEE: The question is,
to what lengths would you go,

where would you go to look,
how many poisons would you try,

to try to cure this child...

Not any child, not an abstract
child, but this child...

And that was what was driving Farber.

NARRATOR: Sidney Farber had first arrived

at Boston Children's in 1929,

becoming the hospital's
first full-time pathologist.

In his small basement lab
over the next two decades,

Farber would view diseased tissue samples

from thousands of children,

many of their lives
cut short by leukemia.

For generations, doctors had tried

to devise medicines to treat leukemia.

They knew that the only
way to combat the disease

would be to stop the runaway
growth of white blood cells,

and since that kind of
out-of-control growth

was the common feature
of all malignancies,

they hoped that leukemia
would point the way

toward treating a whole
universe of cancers.

MUKHERJEE: It is not a coincidence that

cancer's history, at least
the modern history of cancer,

begins with childhood leukemia.

A disease that carries 100% mortality,

that occurs in children,

and carries this kind
of accelerated course

was really a kind of reminder
of the urgency of the problem.

NARRATOR: For Farber,

the scientific puzzle of leukemia,

coupled with its human toll,
made it impossible to ignore.

He was irresistibly drawn to the
children in the wards upstairs

and to the idea that he could do
something to help them.

MAN: I think that seeing
the ravages of cancer

impels someone like that
to go on a crusade,

to leave the autopsy room

and to say, "I'm going to
move out of my cubbyhole"

"and up from the basement,

"and I'm going to go front and center

to make a difference here."

NEWSREEL: How many have
cancer in the U.S. today?

No man knows.

Last year, 150,000 died of it.

The more science cuts down
on other causes of death,

the more are spared to die of this.

NARRATOR: By the time Sidney
Farber had turned his attention

to helping children like Robert Sandler,

cancer had become the
most feared killer in America.

NEWSREEL: Asleep.

Asleep, save for one
member of the family.

Just one week ago,
Mary Bronson discovered

that she has what may be
a symptom of cancer.

MARY: Cancer. Cancer.

It can start, they say,
almost unnoticeably,

and then it grows and grows,

a horror that never stops.

MAN: Most cancers were incurable.

MARY: Can my family catch it? My friends?

MAN: But not only incurable;

It was thought of, cancer was,
as a contamination.

That was one of the reasons

some people with cancer
isolated themselves...

Because they were aware of
what it meant to some others.

It was the reason that
some people wouldn't let

their children go near
a relative who had cancer.

When I was growing up, I had
an aunt who developed cancer,

and she was hidden in the attic.

MARY: What will happen to me?

DEVLTA: People were ashamed
if they had cancer.

Nobody wanted to be seen if they had it.

MARY: People don't tell you about cancer.

They don't talk about it.

Why not? Is a cancer victim an outcast?

Is there no hope?

No hope?

NULAND: We get the word "cancer"

from the Greek "crab," carcinos,

which in Latin becomes "cancer,"

because as you look at a cancer
grossly, with your naked eye,

what you see is a mass
of tissue in the center,

and it's as though legs are reaching out.

It's this sort of formless thing

that was creeping and
crawling like a crab does.

NARRATOR: Cancer is as
old as human life itself.

The first known written
reference to cancer appears

in a 15-foot papyrus

prepared by an Egyptian
physician 4,000 years ago.

He numbered all the diseases
and their treatments

known to the ancient world.

Case number 45 refers to

"swellings of the breast,
large, spreading, and hard."

Under the section titled "treatment,"

it reads simply, "there is none."

MUKHERJEE: There is something
haunting and prophetic

about that statement.

In fact, it rings through
the history of cancer

over and over again...
"there is no treatment,

there is no treatment,
there is no treatment."

NARRATOR: For centuries,

cancer was considered a
fatal disease without cure.

Ancient physicians had
no real understanding

of where it came from or how it spread.

NULAND: They believed that balance was

the essential thing that kept us healthy.

And what was in balance?

4 different fluids, or humors,
as they called them.

They attributed diseases

to either too much

of one of these humors

or too little.

NARRATOR: In the first century A.D.,

the Roman physician Claudius Galen

theorized that it was an excess
of one of the 4 humors...

Melancholia, or black bile...
That gave rise to cancer.

MUKHERJEE: Black bile was mysterious.

It couldn't be seen,
and was therefore used

to explain diseases that
lacked any other explanation.

NARRATOR: Galen's theories went
unchallenged until the 1530s,

when an anatomy professor
named Andreas Vesalius

set out to create the first detailed maps

of the interior of the human body.

MAN: As he was dissecting human beings,

he found a lot of discrepancies

with what he was studying
in Galen's writings.

And he was not out to topple Galen.

He had a great deal of respect
and reverence for Galen,

but he kept finding things
that did not jibe

with what Galen was saying.

NARRATOR: Bones, organs,

intricate webs of nerves,
arteries, veins.

Vesalius published meticulously
detailed illustrations

of everything he found,

but no matter how hard he
looked, or where he looked,

he could find no trace of black bile.

NULAND: From then on in,

what you begin to look at

is an increased recognition by physicians

that when somebody gets sick,

it's because something is
going on inside their body,

not because the humors have gone wrong,

not because god has decreed it...
None of these things.

Something's going wrong inside the body.

NARRATOR: Every morning,
the doctors, fellows,

and residents in the pediatric unit

at Johns Hopkins Kimmel cancer center

sit down to review
their patients' status.

All right. Who's next?

WOMAN: Olivia is our 17-month-old,

previously healthy female, referred to

the emergency department
by her pediatrician.

We suspected A.L.L.,

just looking at the morphology.

NARRATOR: 17-month-old Olivia Blair

was admitted 24 hours ago.

She was immediately diagnosed with

acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

DOCTOR: So I think we'll, you know,

have a little bit better idea of things

after the procedures today,

and then we can sit down
again and talk some more.

MAN: We had been wondering
what was going on with her,

so we were looking for something
to make it all tie together

and make it make sense.

She just seemed like
she was sick all the time.

You know, you could tell, like,

there was definitely something wrong.

This is not normal.

She was a pretty healthy child,
you know, up to that point.

I just felt like I was giving her Tylenol

and Advil every single day.

Then she started to have that cold.

It's all right, baby. Don't cry.

104 fever. She scared me.

We hope, and we think,

that she is going to be low risk.

MAN: Yeah.

The other things that will
help to determine her risk

going forward is, number
one, the spinal fluid test.

We need to make sure that
there's no leukemia in there.

MAN: The bone marrow,
where we normally produce blood,

is kind of like your lawn,
and leukemia is like weeds,

so leukemia can overtake
the normal grass and kill it.

So, it's not enough just to mow the lawn.

You've got to go and get the roots

of all of the weeds and get
all of the leukemia cells out

in order for the grass
to be healthy again.

Take some local anesthesia.

It's not a perfect scenario.
The treatment is tough.

It's a long treatment.
It's tough treatment.

OK. Phase two.

NARRATOR: Olivia's treatment
has to begin immediately,

before the disease progresses too far.

She receives her first
dose of chemotherapy

directly into her spine.

WOMAN: She's breathing
a little funny because

she's sleeping so deeply, OK?

So sometimes, just because
she's not fully awake...

OK.

[EXHALES]

It scares me.

Do you want a seat on this side?

I don't like to see her like that.

KELLY [VOICE]: I started to pinch myself,

like, "wake up. This isn't
happening right now."

"That's not my daughter.

"She's not sick. That's not
my daughter out there.

"She's not going through this right now.

This isn't happening. No."

BROWN: For most parents,
it is their worst nightmare,

and our job is to help them recognize

that while this is obviously
a shock and something that,

you know, will turn
their world upside-down,

it's something that together,

we have to figure out
a way to work through.

You know? They've got to be
able to function as parents,

now more than ever.

Yeah. that feel better?

MARCUS [VOICE]: No one has a manual

for trying to figure this all out.

You're thinking that...

Is my daughter gonna die?

NARRATOR: In December 1947,

within days of arriving at
Boston Children's Hospital,

3-year-old Robert Sandler
received his first injection

of the highly experimental
drug Aminopterin.

As Dr. Sidney Farber and his staff

anxiously monitored his condition,

Robert soon began to show results.

Within weeks, his blood,
that had been choked with

rapidly dividing white blood cells,

returned to normal.

Farber noted that Sandler's
distended belly had shrunk.

His appetite had returned,

and he had begun playing
in the hospital corridors.

SANDLER: When Robert
went into remission...

What we now know is remission...
To me, he just got better.

He just was my brother again.

It was a happy time.

We were raising Cain in the apartment.

I didn't have to worry

about him not being there in the morning.

I didn't have to worry
about him being sick.

We thought it was a cure.

MAN: The first demonstration of anything

is an extraordinary breakthrough,

because leukemia was considered to be

an absolutely fatal disease,

and nobody thought that
anyone would survive.

NARRATOR: Other children
under Farber's care

also showed promising signs of remission.

Perhaps Aminopterin,

the drug his colleagues had so resisted,

might hold the key
to a cure for leukemia.

MUKHERJEE: News of these remissions

really spread through Boston,
and the idea that

you could hold cancer
at bay with a chemical

was suddenly in the public consciousness.

This is a time when
people thought about cancer

really as one kind of disease,
and so the idea was

that if you could cure

or even potentially hold at bay leukemia,

this could extend out
to all other cancers.

NARRATOR: The dream of a cure for cancer

had long consumed some of
the greatest minds in science,

but had always foundered
on a limited understanding

of what cancer actually was.

In 1855, a young German
biologist named Rudolph Virchow

stared down the barrel of his microscope

and fixed on the honeycomb of structures

that made up a sample of tissue.

Others had named these
structures "cells,"

after the spartan rooms
in which monks lived and prayed.

Virchow had a revolutionary
theory to explain cells...

They were not only
the basis of healthy life,

but of disease.

A cell, he wrote, is
"the ultimate irreducible form

"of every living element,
and from it emanate

"all the activities of life,

both in health and in sickness."

NULAND: As he studied cells
under the microscope,

he came to realize that there wasn't

some strange material
that made the cells,

but that every cell came
from a previous cell.

Once he pointed out that thesis...

"Omnis cellula e cellula," he called it,

"every cell from another cell"...

That changed the understanding
of what cancer was.

Cancer cells clearly came

from cells that weren't cancerous.

They clearly came from

perfectly normal cells
that had been changed.

NARRATOR: Virchow's discovery
pointed to surgery

as the primary treatment
for most forms of cancer.

If tumors were merely
collections of abnormal cells,

it should be possible to
cut them from the body.

MUKHERJEE: With the advent of anesthesia

and antisepsis, with the
advent of clean surgery,

surgeons could now attack
cancer with a real bravado.

This was the golden age
of cancer surgery.

NARRATOR: No one championed surgery

with more single-minded purpose

than a doctor named William Halsted.

Halsted entered the field
of medicine in 1868

because he did not want to work

in his father's clothing business.

Once he'd found surgery, though,
he'd found his calling.

NULAND: He was a dashing,
exciting surgeon

because of how quick he was.

He developed a great reputation
in New York City.

NARRATOR: From the beginning,
Halsted was known

for his innovative and complex surgeries.

He seemed intent on pushing himself

and his patients to the limit.

MUKHERJEE: He's addicted to perfection.

He's addicted to the idea that

the reason that cancer is
not being appropriately treated

is because the surgeons
aren't trying hard enough.

If they only tried more,
if they tried better,

if they were more perfect,

if they could deliver
a more perfect operation,

then, in fact, they would cure more.

Cutting more meant curing more.

NARRATOR: In 1890, Halsted
became chief of surgery

at the new Johns Hopkins
hospital in Baltimore,

where he concentrated on
patients with breast cancer.

As he operated on more and more women,

Halsted confronted a puzzle that
had long mystified surgeons...

Even when the breast was removed,

cancer could still reappear

in entirely new places in the body.

Halsted thought he understood why.

He believed that stray
cancer cells had escaped

at the margins of his incisions.

His answer was to cut

an ever-widening arc of tissue.

WOMAN: Halsted started with the idea

that cancer started in the breast,

and it grew centrifugally.

It grew out from the original cancer.

It had roots, it had, like, tentacles,

and that if you could just
get widely around it enough,

you could get it all out,
and you could cure it.

MARKEL: And so Halsted got the idea,

what if I remove the muscle
underneath the breast

and then the muscle underneath that

and then the lymph nodes beyond that?

So he was doing this excavation
in people's chests.

He was really pushing the envelope.

How far could you go with your scalpel?

NARRATOR: Halsted called his procedure

the radical mastectomy...

"Radical" after the original
Latin "by the root,"

but others took it for the more
common meaning, "extreme."

LOVE: From a woman's standpoint,
it's horrendous,

because you're left completely flat.

Not only do you not have the breast,

but you don't have your
pectoralis muscle, either,

so it's just ribs,
and often you don't have

a nice fold in your armpit
the way you normally do

because that muscle is taken, as well,

and so it's really ugly
and very deforming.

NARRATOR: Despite the damage they caused,

Halsted's radical operations did succeed

in saving the lives of
many of his patients

whose cancers had not yet
spread beyond the breast.

MARKEL: When you think about removing

the amount of tissue he's removing

and still having decent results,

this is not a hack job.

People who have described
watching Halsted operate

speak of it in hushed, reverential tones.

It was like watching, you know,

a virtuoso violinist or a great pianist.

There were very few people who could do

what Halsted could do back then,

and so every doctor,
every surgeon turned their eyes

to Baltimore to see what
the great Halsted was doing.

NARRATOR: Before long,
other surgeons around the world

were not only imitating his operation,

but taking it even further.

In time, the radical mastectomy yielded

to the super radical
and then the ultra-radical,

and they did not stop there.

MAN: Surgeons used the
Halstedian principles

of radical surgery for cancer,

and they expanded it to other areas.

They adopted the technique
for cancers of other organs,

so it grew widely throughout
the specialties of surgery

in the first half of the 20th century.

The common concept in
surgical oncology was

a big operation is more likely
to cure a big cancer.

NARRATOR: But there was
a problem with radical surgery.

Whether it was for cancer
in the breast, lung,

prostate, or any other organ,

no matter how skilled the
surgeon or bold the operation,

a significant number of
patients still relapsed

with the disease elsewhere
in their bodies,

as if the cancer had leapfrogged
the surgeons' incisions.

Clearly, there was a limit
to what surgery could do.

Once the cancer had spread,
it was too late.

MUKHERJEE: Halsted's approach
did work for some patients.

It was almost right, but it
was not the full answer.

And this idea... that, you know,
you can take half-truths

and you make full truths out of them,

and then the logic of the field closes

because you say to yourself,
this is the truth

and therefore lies outside the
boundaries of being testable.

NARRATOR: As surgeons
searched for an answer

as to why some cancers had
escaped their incisions,

another therapy appeared
at the turn of the 20th century

that seemed to promise greater success

with far less damage.

In the winter of 1896,

a21-year-old medical student in Chicago

named Emil Grubbé
began experimenting with

a newly discovered form of
radiation called x-rays.

The mysterious rays were able
to pass through the skin.

Grubbé wondered if they
could be focused enough

and intense enough

to burn out tumors
inaccessible to surgeons.

On the evening of January 29,

he aimed his homemade X-ray machine

at the chest of a woman
suffering from breast cancer.

After 18 nightly treatments,

the tumor miraculously began to shrink.

Radiation was soon heralded
as a miracle treatment.

"I believe this is an absolute
cure for all forms of cancer,"

one Chicago physician exclaimed.

"I do not know its limitations."

MUKHERJEE: Radiation was
the invisible knife,

and therefore, it could cut into areas

that the surgeon couldn't get to.

It was called the hot knife,

as opposed to the surgeon's cold knife.

Grubbé realizes that
irradiation is also a poison,

and if we can give just
the adequate dose of poison,

perhaps by giving it locally
only where the cancer is,

then we could kill the cancer
and spare the human body.

NARRATOR: In the early 1900s,

Polish-born scientist
Marie curie isolated radium,

a highly radioactive element.

Alongside x-rays, her discovery
spawned an industry.

In the next few years,
hundreds of radiation clinics

opened their doors
across the United States

promising a new treatment for cancer.

Grubbé himself was soon
treating some 75 patients a day

with a primitive apparatus.

Over the years, his gadget gave way

to ever more powerful machines.

By the 1950s, a Stanford
university scientist

would even use a 6-million-volt
linear accelerator

to cure a limited number of cancers,

like Hodgkin's lymphoma.

But along with radiation's
curative powers,

doctors also discovered
its harmful effects.

In high doses, it could
burn, scar, or blind.

Sometimes, it even
seemed to cause cancer.

Grubbé himself fell victim
to radiation poisoning,

losing his hand, forearm, and upper lip.

MAN: All of this was trial and error.

Many, many mistakes were made.

Some of the most tragic mistakes

were the deaths of the
early investigators themselves,

who often died of leukemia,
of bone and other cancers

that were caused by the radiation

that they didn't understand
was a very potent carcinogen.

NARRATOR: Perhaps more careful handling

could mitigate the dangers of radiation,

but there was a deeper problem.

Like Halsted's radical surgery,
radiation was effective

only when cancer remained localized.

If the cancer had spread,

radiation was as powerless
as Halsted's knife.

It was increasingly obvious
that what was needed

was a third approach
that would attack cancer

wherever it had spread in the body...

A systemic treatment to
conquer a systemic disease.

WOMAN: This is Olivia Blair.

We have consent for bone marrow biopsy,

bone marrow aspirate, lumbar puncture,

administration of ITC,
intrathecal chemotherapy.

SISON: Correct.

NARRATOR: For leukemia patients today,

the standard protocol
is to attack the cancer

with multiple rounds of chemotherapy,

but that won't be enough
for Olivia Blair.

After a series of additional tests

at John Hopkins Kimmel cancer center,

doctors have discovered
that Olivia's leukemia,

a type called t-cell,

has spread to her central nervous system,

making the disease high risk.

MAN: The central nervous system,

which includes the brain
and the spinal cord,

that is actually a sanctuary or
hiding site for leukemia cells.

MAN: So obviously, the question is,

what does this mean for Olivia?

Yeah. I'm automatically thinking that...

The leukemia is in her spine.

It's in her brain.

So it's more serious, then?
It's high risk.

What that means is that

her therapy will be more intense,

that she'll get extra chemotherapy,

and then we are also

are going to recommend that she gets

spine radiation and
radiation to the brain.

We don't want to do radiation.

I know.

Right?

So we...

Why... why are we doing that?

SISON: Because we know
that radiation will treat it.

But we know that the radiation therapy

could potentially have effects

on her cognitive abilities going forward.

I just...

Come on, babe.

Come on. You're all right.

We gave you one scenario yesterday.

She's such a smart child.

I know she is.

She is, and she is going
to continue to be smart.

She has me and you as parents.

She won't see me like this, but...

I know.

I need to get this out.

OK.

She...

She is an extremely smart child.

How is this going to affect her?

You don't know. Right?

Right.

SISON: If Olivia was 7 years old,

we would not have a big problem
radiating her brain.

The problem is that
because she's 17 months,

her brain is not fully developed.

It's almost there, but it's
not fully developed.

So one of the things that
we are very worried about

and thinking about for Olivia

is the role of radiation therapy.

We know that at the
dose that we prescribe,

there is certainly a chance of having

a drop, for example,

of, say, 10 IQ points or so,

but not anything
necessarily more than that.

That's not something trivial, though.

We understand.

SISON [VOICE]: The way that I'm looking

at her case, frankly,
is that we get one shot at this

to get a good outcome to treat very well

because right now, the outcomes for kids

with relapsed t-cell leukemia
is not very good.

It's less than 50% long-term survival.

From a medical perspective,
I'm willing to sacrifice

the risk to her intelligence

in order to cure her disease.

MAN: We need to have
the talk this morning

and try to get the MRI this morning

to really get a handle on
everything that's going on.

I don't want to have
more talks with you guys.

SISON: We don't, either.

MAN: I know this has
been a rollercoaster.

Like, when we came in,
we were very optimistic,

and we still are very optimistic about

the ability to cure your daughter.

Nothing is going to
change in this first month,

so we have some
time to figure things out.

BROWN: What lengths are we willing to go

in the attempt to cure a child?

We are quite willing to push the envelope

in terms of toxicity

because we know what's at stake

is the rest of the child's life,

and that's a potentially a very long life

if they can be cured.

NARRATOR: For hundreds of years,

doctors searched for a systemic
treatment for cancer...

A chemical or drug that
could find the disease

wherever it had traveled in the body

and destroy it.

MUKHERJEE: Chemotherapy,
the idea of using

a chemical against cancer,
actually has ancient roots.

For a long time,

forced by the lack of any other options,

scientists and physicians were throwing

all sorts of chemical mixtures at cancer.

The medieval apothecary
was full of remedies,

such as boar's tooth and fox's lung

and crabs' legs ground up,

and people, forced by desperation,

tried all of these things.

NARRATOR: But without understanding

even the basic biology of the human cell,

chemical remedies were
little more than guesswork.

Then, in Leipzig, Germany, in the 1870s,

a scientist named Paul Ehrlich
began to dig deeper.

Ehrlich experimented with cloth dyes

from the textile factories near his home.

He noticed that the dyes stained

only certain parts of a cell,

as if drawn to them like a magnet.

He wondered if such "selective affinity,"

as he called it, might mean that

chemical poisons could be
directed at diseased cells,

while leaving healthy cells alone.

MUKHERJEE: Paul Ehrlich decides

that perhaps chemicals can
fit into other chemicals

like locks and keys
can fit into each other,

and so the idea grows within Ehrlich

that you can find specific
chemicals that will

kill specific organisms
and spare other organisms.

NARRATOR: Ehrlich called
these hypothetical drugs

"magic bullets."

MARKEL: His theory was
that every disease has

an antidote, if you will,

a "magic bullet" that will
find it, root it out,

bind to it, and render it harmless.

NARRATOR: Ehrlich would eventually create

some of the first modern drugs,

such as Salvarsan for syphilis,

for which he won the Nobel prize.

But at his death in 1915,

the cancer cell, the target
he'd hoped to hit,

remained stubbornly out of reach.

On a foggy night in July 1917,

in the midst of the first world war,

a volley of German artillery
shells rained down

among British troops dug in
near a small Belgian town.

The shells carried a liquid
that quickly vaporized.

It was mustard gas,
and in that one battle,

it caused almost 8,000 casualties.

Its immediate effects were horrific...

Burns, blisters, blindness, death.

But it had a longer-term effect, as well,

evident in the few who survived it.

The chemicals in the gas seemed to target

only the white blood cells
in its victims.

MARKEL: Doctors realized by looking at

the bone marrow of these patients

that the white blood cells were
wiped out of the bone marrow.

It was gone. It was a ghost town.

That was a very interesting observation,

but since mustard gas wasn't being used

in the years after world war I,

nobody really thought much about it.

NARRATOR: In 1942,
during the second world war,

two Yale university researchers,

Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman,

rediscovered the strange
inhibitory effect

mustard gas has on white blood cells.

Though they understood how toxic
such a chemical would be,

the researchers set out to see

if it could stop cancers of the blood.

Because mustard gas had been banned

by international agreement,

the researchers worked in secret.

They first tested
a mustard gas derivative

known as nitrogen mustard

on a 48-year-old factory worker
suffering from lymphoma.

He was identified only as J.D.

Just as mustard gas had killed

the white blood cells
of world war I soldiers,

its cousin nitrogen mustard

Aldo destroyed J.D.'s cancerous
white blood cells,

giving him a brief reprieve
from his disease

before it eventually overwhelmed him.

MARKEL: They put two and two
together and said,

"huh. Maybe this is a magic bullet,

"one of the magic bullets

that Dr. Ehrlich was
hypothesizing about."

NARRATOR: In 1946,
with wartime secrecy lifted,

the Yale researchers were
finally able to publish

the results of their study.

MARKEL: That started the ball rolling,

that there were certain
chemicals that were

far more active against
cancer cells than normal cells

and that if you could use it
in a controlled, measured way,

you could use that to root out the cancer

and kill it and cure the patient.

NARRATOR: When Sidney Farber read

Goodman and Gilman's report,

his reaction was that of
a doctor of dying children...

Urgent, pragmatic, and insistent.

Nitrogen mustard had shown

that chemicals could work against cancer.

Now it was time to try others, he said.

"The 325,000 patients with cancer

who are going to die
this year cannot wait."

MUKHERJEE: Farber was looking
for something less toxic.

He was worried that using
chemicals like nitrogen mustard

would have such natural
limitations in sick children

that he wanted other alternatives,

and he wanted something that
would attack growing blood cells

with a little bit more specificity

than just another chemical poison.

NARRATOR: Farber hoped that
Aminopterin would be that drug.

In June 1948, Robert Sandler's
remarkable recovery

from leukemia was in its sixth month.

His case was featured in
a report Farber published

on the Aminopterin trial

in "the New England Journal of Medicine."

It announced to the world

that 10 of 16 children
treated with the drug,

including Robert,

had experienced significant remissions.

As the report went to press,

most of those children were still alive,

filling their parents, their physicians,

and the public with hope.

But in the months that followed,
their leukemia returned,

beyond the reach of Farber's drug.

One by one, they succumbed
to their illness.

SANDLER: The last time I saw my brother,

he was pretty sick.

It was late at night.

They called the ambulance.

The two gentlemen who got out there

were in their white smocks.

They came upstairs,
and they had lanterns...

Not flashlights, but lanterns.

In fact, they flashed one of
those lanterns in my room,

and then they were told it
was in the next room down,

on the other side.

And he was crying.

Out the door they went,

and that was the last time I saw him.

I don't even think he waved
to me as he was leaving.

Those are some of the things
that are just burnt in...

Like you open a book,
and there's the page.

NARRATOR: Robert Sandler
died on April 2, 1949,

not long before his fourth birthday.

BOY: Is it my turn?

WOMAN: Hey, Luca.

What?

Jonathan's mom wants to know,

what do you want to be when you grow up?

What do you mean?

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Entrepreneur.

Ha, ha, ha! That's what he told you.

NARRATOR: Luca Assante was first diagnosed

with rhabdomyosarcoma,
a cancer of the muscles,

when he was 2 years old.

Because his tumor was
resistant to treatment,

his doctors at Johns Hopkins

resorted to high doses of chemotherapy.

You're going to stay
with me forever, right?

No.

BROWN: Luca received
what we would consider

just generally a salvage regimen,

so these are drugs that
might have more toxicities,

so we make sure parents understand that

there is a small risk that
your child will develop

a secondary cancer, a secondary leukemia,

from this treatment itself.

One of the true ironies
of oncology treatment

as it's given today, and as it's
been given for several decades,

is that the very drugs
that treat the cancer

can themselves be cancer causing.

NARRATOR: Luca was in
remission for 2 and 1/2 years,

but in the spring of 2013,
during a routine follow-up exam,

blood tests showed that
he had developed leukemia,

most likely the result of
his earlier treatment.

MAN: "doctor fees. Pay 50."

I have to pay 50?

No. I do.

You do? To me or to the bank?

He also had positive titers...

MAN [VOICE]: One of the reasons

that this weighs on me, us,
is that nobody caused

the rhabdomyosarcoma... it happened...

But somebody caused the leukemia.

The drugs we gave him
caused the leukemia.

I told Luca's family
that this wasn't good

and that it wasn't curable

without a bone marrow transplant.

NARRATOR: Luca received a
transplant from his sister

42 days after entering the hospital.

It restored his immune system,

which his doctors had
intentionally wiped out,

along with his leukemia,
with high doses of chemotherapy.

MOTHER: You want to try to eat something?

I'm not eating.

But you got to try today,
so we can get the tube out.

Are we done?

You got to one on the other side,

right there.

All right. Luca's next.

NARRATOR: 17 days later,

he remains under close supervision.

MAN: Hi. Good morning.

Hey, he's up!

Can we see under your shirt?

Thank you, sir.

MOTHER: Is it itchy?

No.

No?

BROWN: It's still warm.

I don't feel it quite
as much as yesterday.

It doesn't seem as raised.

WOMAN: It's really
significant, though, isn't it?

BROWN: Yeah. The likely
cause of this rash is

that as his sister's cells
have now started to take

and make their own blood.

WOMAN: His sister's
growing inside of him.

MOTHER: But it's not
like you test his blood,

and it would change or
anything, because it's...

BROWN: Oh, it does.

MOTHER: Kind of cool, right?

Kind of cool.

BROWN [VOICE]:
What we hope to see is that

there's very little of Luca left
in his blood and bone marrow

and lots and lots of his sister there.

BROWN: I think we're still on track.

Nothing that's happened
has put us off track

for you guys getting
out of here real soon.

MOTHER: OK. That's what matters.

Cool.

BROWN [VOICE]: It's unbelievable

what these kids can bounce
back from and tolerate,

and hopefully, he's on his way
to getting better from this.

He's by no means out of the woods,

but there is a real hope

that this too can be treated successfully

and he can get on with
the rest of his life,

and that's what we're shooting for.

Let's go see if you
can play with the Wii.

NARRATOR: In the late 1940s,
researchers still believed

that cancer, no matter where
it appeared in the body,

was a single disease

for which there would
someday be a single cure.

The fleeting success
of his Aminopterin trial

had convinced Sidney Farber

that he was on the right
path to finding that cure.

But if chemicals were the answer,

he'd need to try many more of
them on his young patients,

who were still dying despite
his attempts to save them.

That would require a great deal of money.

Farber hoped he could convince
the public to provide it.

NEWSREEL: The first lady enlists

in America's fight
on infantile paralysis.

NARRATOR: Fortunately, there was a model

for just such a fundraising campaign,

focused on the eradication
of a single disease.

Every summer, for decades,
infantile paralysis... polio...

Struck down thousands of children.

Sidney Farber had encountered the disease

as a young resident in the 1930s.

He'd also witnessed, and admired,

the vast public and private
effort to eradicate polio

called the march of dimes.

And I'd like a dime in change, too.

Are you saving them, Mickey?

Mm-hmm. I'm gonna give
mine to president Roosevelt.

The president? Why, Mickey!

Yes. You see, Judy, I've got
my envelope made out right here.

It's all ready to go. See for yourself.

Oh, I know. That's the march of dimes,

the infantile paralysis fund.

That's right.

NARRATOR: With the help
of Hollywood celebrities,

the march of dimes mobilized the public,

who sent in coins
by the tens of millions.

ROOSEVELT: I wish to express

heartfelt thanks to all of you

who have contributed
your dimes and your dollars

to further the fight
against a cruel disease.

NARRATOR: Within a decade,

the campaign had raised
more than $200 million,

funding the research that
led to the Salk vaccine.

The march of dimes had inspired many

to join the fight against other diseases.

Among them were the leaders

of the variety club of New England,

who came to visit Boston
children's hospital in May 1947,

just as Farber was in the midst
of his Aminopterin trial.

NATHAN: My uncle and his partner started

to go around Boston looking
for a place to put money,

and they found, sitting in
the little dirty old basement

of the children's hospital,

Sidney Farber in his white coat.

NARRATOR: Farber seized
the opportunity to lay out

his grand vision for
a new kind of hospital,

dedicated to childhood cancer.

NATHAN: Sidney had enormous ideas.

He had already started
this treatment program

in childhood leukemia,

and he was going to build a new hospital.

He presented them with his idea that

he could manage childhood
cancer on the first floor,

and then there would be
a tower of laboratories

that would cure these patients
and find the answers.

Well, it was for them,

exactly what they were looking for.

They wanted something big,
and he gave it to them.

RADIO: Now, in a few moments,

we will bring to our
microphone the winner

of the Jane Doe contest, but first...

NARRATOR: On the evening of May 22, 1948,

Ralph Edwards, the popular host

of the radio show
"truth or consequences,"

interrupted his usual
broadcast from California

and linked to a room at
Boston children's hospital,

where a little boy lay ill.

EDWARDS: Well, we're not going
to give you his last name,

because he's just like thousands
of other young fellows and girls

in private homes and hospitals
all over the country.

Jimmy is suffering from cancer,

but he doesn't know he has it.

NARRATOR: "Jimmy" was
actually a 12-year-old boy

named Einar Gustafson.

Farber had changed his name
to protect his identity

and broaden his appeal

so that he could become the mascot

for his new cancer-fighting organization,

the Jimmy Fund.

EDWARDS: Hello, Jimmy!

JIMMY: Hi.

Who do you think

is going to win the pennant this year?

The Boston Braves, I hope.

Ha, ha! Who's the catcher?

Phil Masi.

That's right. Have you
ever met Phil Masi?

No.

MAN: Hi, Jimmy. My name is Phil Masi.

Who is that, Jimmy?

Phil Masi!

Well, where is he?

In my room.

MUKHERJEE: This was a way

of really turning around
the conversation.

Cancer was not some abstraction
that we couldn't talk about,

we were too worried to talk about.

Cancer was Jimmy.

Here was a real child with real cancer.

They weren't donating to
Sidney Farber's fund for cancer.

They weren't donating

to children's hospital fund for cancer.

They were sending money
directly to Jimmy.

NARRATOR: Donations poured in,

many in envelopes addressed simply to

"Jimmy, Boston, Massachusetts."

The "truth or consequences"
radio broadcast,

which had hoped to raise $20,000,

raised 200,000.

Soon, red-and-white Jimmy Fund cans

seemed to be everywhere...

In movie theaters,

next to the cash registers
in grocery stores,

posted outside baseball stadiums.

MAN: The variety club of New England

presents the great heart award

to Dr. Sidney Farber, medical statesman.

His vision extends beyond his laboratory.

May I take this opportunity...

NARRATOR: With the Jimmy Fund,

the scientist Sidney Farber
had also become a public figure

by offering the hope for a cure.

MAN: Now, thanks to you, there's a new

and beautifully equipped
Jimmy Fund building,

where more than 200 children with cancer

are given care and treatment every day.

NARRATOR: On January 7, 1952,

Farber opened the cancer
hospital he'd dreamed of,

a modernist 5-story building

called the Jimmy Fund clinic.

WOMAN: It was just a wonderful place,

full of toys and trains,

and the clinic, the Jimmy Fund clinic,

made everybody just as
comfortable as could be.

WOMAN: These children were special.

It was a very open, free atmosphere.

The children could mix
from one room to another,

from one bed to another.

NARRATOR: Farber was deeply moved

by the plight of the
children under his care,

though he rarely showed it.

EVANS: Sometimes in the evening
before he was leaving,

when everything was quiet,
Dr. Farber would just go

into a room and look at a sleeping child

and stand maybe at the foot of the bed

or just inside the door,

and he had a deep humanity.

These were his children.

He talked about it...
Sort of his children.

NARRATOR: Farber's certainty
that a cure would be found

helped keep despair at bay.

The Jimmy Fund clinic, one visitor wrote,

"seemed suspended between two poles,

"both wonderful and tragic,

unspeakably depressing
and indescribably hopeful."

MAN: My father never
talked about his work

in terms of failure.

He was engaged in hope.

Hope really was his driving element.

In order to keep children
alive through chemotherapy,

often, the treatments were going
to be enormously punishing,

and you just had to believe,

you had to have a faith that
there was a reason for this

and that things would improve.

Luca.

NARRATOR: It's been 3 weeks

since 6-year-old Luca Assante received

a bone marrow transplant,

but complications are setting in.

MOTHER: Luca feeling like this is crappy.

He's been sleeping half the day.

Yes.

So his fever went up.

I mean, just not been feeling good.

You know?

Oh, boy.

Wake him up. Let him know you're here.

I tried. Luca.

MAN [VOICE]: This is
actually my first time

I come up and he's sleeping.

He's always awake.

So... he's tired.

Luca, you want to eat something?

Hmm?

No?

Does your back itch?

Huh?

NARRATOR: Luca is suffering

from graft-versus-host disease.

The immune system
transplanted from his sister

has begun to attack his own cells

as if they were foreign,
like an infection.

The big issue since last week

was the development of rash

that progressed on Friday.

NARRATOR: The doctors' hope is
that Luca's new immune system

will attack only his cancer cells,

a beneficial effect called
graft-versus-tumor,

but if it goes beyond the cancer cells

and begins to attack his organs,

it could threaten his life.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Uh-oh. somebody's hiding.

Where's Luca?

MOTHER: How do you feel?

NARRATOR: Luca's doctors are concerned

because his liver is
showing signs of distress,

but they don't know what the
source of the problem is...

A viral infection

or his new immune system
turning against him.

LOEB [VOICE]: The things
that have been challenging

about taking care of Luca...
It has been hard to come up

with clear diagnoses for
what's been happening.

NARRATOR: There is very
little margin for error

in Luca's therapy.

The dilemma is that the treatment for

graft-versus-host disease...
To suppress the immune system...

Could actually make
a viral infection worse.

To try to find out what's
going on inside Luca's liver,

his doctors must perform a biopsy.

MOTHER: She's giving you

pain meds right now, sweetie.

I hurt!

I want to see exactly where it hurts.

NARRATOR: Luca's liver is so weakened

by his cancer treatment

that the operation pitches him
into yet another crisis.

His blood cannot clot,

and he is hemorrhaging internally.

Your stomach hurts?

MAN: It's going to be
sore, buddy. I'm sorry.

MOTHER [VOICE]: I don't think

anybody would think this would happen.

I don't think we thought it
was going to turn that bad.

NARRATOR: Luca will be taken to

the pediatric intensive care unit,

where his condition can
be closely monitored.

LUCY [VOICE]: When you
hear that someone is going

to the PICU, you know
that it's super serious,

so the PICU scares me.

It really does.

But I would stay here for months.

I would stay here for years,

if that's what would
make his body better.

FILM: Youngsters from all over the world

are being cared for by doctors and nurses

backed by teams of
scientists and researchers

at the Jimmy Fund building

with just one goal... the cure of cancer.

NARRATOR: At the new clinic
in the early 1950s,

Sidney Farber was doing
everything he possibly could

to cure the children under his care,

but he was making

little clinical progress
against leukemia.

Within the cheerful wards
of the hospital,

he tried new drugs at ever-higher doses,

but in the end, the children always died.

The scope of the problem was
too big and too expensive

for any one man or any one clinic.

Farber knew he needed still more help

if he was ever going to
create a research program

big enough to conquer cancer.

He needed an ally.

Mrs. Albert D. Lasker

is a woman of many and varied interests...

Flowers and philanthropy,

cancer research and community welfare.

Mary, are you happy
with what is being done

in the whole area of financing

medical research in this country?

Oh, I'm not a bit happy about it.

The amount of money that's
available for research

is totally inadequate
in the United States.

You won't believe this...

Less is spent on cancer research

than we spend on chewing gum!

NARRATOR: Mary Lasker
was not a scientist,

not a doctor.

NEWSREEL: America's foremost
medical scientists

and administrators received

the American public health
association's Lasker awards.

NARRATOR: She was a wealthy socialite

and a prodigious fundraiser

with a passionate interest
in eradicating disease.

NEWSREEL: Mrs. Mary Lasker
and Dr. George Bayer,

head of New York Academy of Medicine,

present the medical Oscars in Boston.

NARRATOR: "I am opposed to illness,"

she once told a reporter,
"the way one is opposed to sin."

WOMAN: I often asked Mary
why this had become

such a consuming passion and conviction,

and she said, "well, I suppose it started

that I suffered illness
and pain when I was a child."

NARRATOR: Born in a small
Wisconsin town in 1900,

Mary Woodard suffered from
life-threatening infections,

which left her, as she would later say,

"deeply resentful" of medicine's limits

and acutely sensitive to
the suffering of others.

BLAIR: One day,
her mother took her to see

the family laundress, who had
had double mastectomies,

and Mary said, "why were they cut off?"

And her mother said,
"to try to save her life."

She was outraged by disease and illness.

NARRATOR: After moving to New York,

Mary became a successful business owner,

selling high-society
dress patterns to working women.

There, she met her
second husband in 1939,

a wealthy advertising executive
20 years her senior

named Albert Lasker.

ADVERTISEMENT: Places all!

All join hands. Circle left.

NARRATOR: One of the most
influential admen of his time,

Albert had made a fortune
promoting products

like lucky strike cigarettes.

AD: ♪ yes, for smoking
that you're bound to like ♪

♪ you just can't beat a lucky strike ♪

MAN: On their wedding night,
Albert says to Mary,

"what do you want to do with your life?"

Mary said, "I want to do
something for human health",

"the major diseases

and crippling diseases of mankind."

NARRATOR: Above all,
Mary wanted to cure the disease

that had long ago disfigured
her family's laundress.

Before long, Albert had
enlisted in Mary's cause.

There was limitless money
out there, he told her,

and he would show her how to get it.

The couple held lavish fundraisers

in their east side apartment.

MARY LASKER: I have some
pictures here by Cezanne

and Manet and Renoir, Van Gogh.

GUTTERMAN: She felt that
you had to have money

to get people working on a problem.

She once called money "frozen energy,"

and I think it's an apt description.

It's perfect.

"What's the money doing?"

I mean, she would complain
about this all the time.

NARRATOR: In 1944, the Laskers
took over a small charity

called the American society
for the control of cancer.

MAN: Strike back at cancer!

Give to the American cancer society.

They renamed it the
American Cancer Society

and stacked its board

with advertising executives.

They not only wanted to raise money,

they wanted to remove
the stigma around cancer,

with the help of Madison
Avenue salesmanship.

Did you know that cancer
kills more children

between the ages of 3 and 15

than any other disease?

Give generously to the
American Cancer Society.

It's really very simple...
Just mail your gift

in an envelope, addressed like this.

MUKHERJEE: Mary Lasker
brought a kind of energy,

a kind of dynamism, a kind of vision

that had never existed before.

She began to create

a kind of public force around cancer

by deploying all her wealthy friends,

but reaching deeply into the
minds of the American public,

and in doing so,
cancer could make that leap

away from, you know, the backwards,

the shunned-away, the pariahs of medicine

into becoming a vast public phenomenon.

Mary Lasker, as a person of some means

and great interest, you can devote

much of your time to medical research.

How do you go about

enlisting support for your views?

Well, I'm very vocal about them,

and I urge everybody to give more

to the voluntary agencies like

the American Cancer Society and others,

and I urge them...

NARRATOR: Mary Lasker
battled cancer every day

in the public eye,

but she lost the battle at home.

On May 30, 1952,

Albert Lasker died of colon cancer.

Mary Lasker redoubled her efforts

against the hated disease.

She knew she could only get
so far with private funds.

She had to tap the vast coffers
of the Federal Government.

For this, she would need
a bona-fide scientist

to validate her Evangelical
belief in a cure.

There was only one possible
man for the job.

GROOPMAN: Mary Lasker
saw in Sidney Farber

someone who could be
presented as a believer

that this can change and that
we can find the answer

and that we will cure cancer.

NARRATOR: Farber had been
searching for that cure

for almost a decade.

He and Lasker concluded
that what was needed was

an all-out coordinated attack on cancer,

undertaken by the largest
private and public partnership

in the history of health care.

GROOPMAN: Mary Lasker
had the political smarts

and the connections,

and Sidney Farber had the gravitas,

and together, they formed
a formidable force

that really couldn't be stopped.

MAN: Dr. Farber has been called

the father of chemotherapy
in the treatment of cancer.

NARRATOR: While Lasker worked
her contacts in Congress,

Farber did his part,

proselytizing for the coming
revolution in chemotherapy.

Dr. Farber, will you make a prediction

as to how long it may take

before cancer can be called conquered?

I don't believe that's possible, sir.

I think the answer is

that there is more activity
and research today

in the field of cancer

than ever in the history
of science and medicine,

and with this tremendous
amount of activity,

I think we have the right to
expect that great progress

and rapid progress will be made.

NARRATOR: Farber and Lasker
concentrated their efforts

on a small, poorly funded
government agency,

the national cancer institute... the NCI.

They hoped to focus its mission

and provide the means

to eradicate all forms of the disease.

By 1955, Lasker and Farber's
efforts had succeeded.

With new appropriations from Congress,

the NCI would quickly become
the center of the cancer world,

and at its center was
its scientific director...

A bold, brilliant specialist
in infectious diseases

named Gordon Zubrod.

During world war II,
Zubrod had helped lead

the Federal Government's massive
effort to combat malaria,

which had ravaged American
forces in the pacific.

He employed some of

the first randomized clinical
trials ever conducted.

Zubrod brought the
same military precision

and Gung-ho spirit to the NCI,

recruiting a new generation
of researchers

willing to try almost
anything to defeat cancer.

One of Zubrod's first recruits

was a 28-year-old specialist
in blood disease

named Emil Freireich.

MAN: We dumped my 3-month-old baby

and my pregnant wife
and my broken-down car

and took everything I owned,
and we drove to Washington,

and I went to his office...
Dr. Zubrod... and I said,

"I'm reporting for active duty."

And he said, "Freireich, what do you do?"

I said, "well, I'm a
trained hematologist.

I made a great discovery in
mechanism of inflammation."

"You should cure leukemia."

"Yes, sir."

NARRATOR: Zubrod paired Emil Freireich

with another young researcher,

coincidentally named Emil Frei.

To tell Frei and Freireich apart,

their colleagues began
calling them Tom and Jay.

MUKHERJEE: They were both named Emil,

but they couldn't have been
more different characters.

Frei was composed, reserved.

He was cool.

Jay Freireich was the opposite.

He was loud. He was passionate.

He was charged.

NARRATOR: Zubrod fostered
a try-anything approach,

which was especially appealing
to Frei and Freireich,

who already had reputations

as daring and innovative researchers.

With their colleagues,

they began to scour the natural world

for chemicals to try against cancer.

No location was too far away,
no compound too exotic.

FILM: The search is worldwide.

There are 10 million natural products

that might contain
an anti-cancer compound.

Near Nairobi, botanists gather
leaves and the bark of trees

to process and test against cancer.

MUKHERJEE: There were
tens of thousands of drugs

that entered the NCI pipeline.

We are talking about an enormous,

extremely sophisticated for its time,

extremely dedicated process,

which creates a vast library of chemicals

from the natural world,
from the unnatural world,

and each chemical asked the question,

does it kill a cancer cell?

What kind of cancer cell? At what dose?

Does it spare a normal cell?

Nothing of this sort had
occurred in the world before.

NARRATOR: Following
Sidney Farber's example,

Frei and Freireich began testing

the most promising chemicals
on children with leukemia.

Parents flocked to the NCI clinic

to enroll their sick
children in the trials.

FREIREICH: They were there
for only one reason...

Not to figure out why they were sick,

not to figure out how they
got sick, but to get better.

They came to the clinical center
like you go to Lourdes.

They came seeking some
relief from the horror

that they had to face.

If you can imagine...

Your children, 6, 8, 10 years old,

and they're bleeding to death,

and they have lumps all over,
and they have headaches,

and they're vomiting, and they hurt.

I mean, it's horrible.

All these parents, just hounding me,

"you've got to do something, Freireich."

Well, we had to do something.

NARRATOR: The researchers
did all they could,

but progress was agonizingly slow.

No sooner would a drug begin to work

than the cancer would
adapt a defense to it.

NATHAN: The problem was resistance,

that cancer is a complicated illness

that can find a way to bypass

the very action of the drug
that you're trying to give.

NARRATOR: But the NCI
researchers believed

they knew how to overcome
the problem of resistance.

FREIREICH: Zubrod came
from infectious disease,

and the infectious disease guys

had learned an important principle...

That is, if you gave
two drugs at the same time,

the emergence of resistance
was prevented,

and it was more effective.

NATHAN: But how much of
each drug should you give?

Should you give a full dose
or cut the dose?

How many doses a day or a week?

It was all unknown.

NARRATOR: Unlike Sidney Farber,

who favored giving one drug at a time,

Frei and Freireich experimented

with two-drug combinations.

Each time, the remissions grew longer,

but still the children relapsed,

or simply succumbed to
the brutal side effects

of the treatment itself.

FREIREICH: At the time,
80% of the children who died,

died just from bleeding to death.

Leukemia didn't have
a chance to kill them.

There's blood on the sheets.

There's blood on the uniforms.

The nurses are covered
in blood from head to toe.

The trials really crept ahead,
month by month by month,

often increasing survival
by 2 months, 4 months, 8 months,

and you could say to yourself,
"why am I doing all of this?

"Am I really doing all
of this to increase

"the lifespan of a child by 3 months?

Is it really worth it?"

NARRATOR: David Nathan arrived
at the NCI's clinical center

as a young researcher assigned
to the leukemia division.

NATHAN: I have to say,

it didn't look like
biomedical research to me.

It looked just like a death warrant.

These kids would come in;

Of course they were going
to die of their disease,

but we were making them much worse.

I felt it very, very keenly.

It was hard.

I felt so badly about what I was doing

that I went to see Dr. Zubrod,

and he wanted me very much to continue,

and I had to tell him

that I just didn't think I could do it.

His answer to me has
always stayed with me.

He said, "I understand you completely."

"I know what this is like.

"I know what's going on there,
but we're committed.

"We're going to do something
about childhood leukemia,

and the only way we can do it
is to push ahead."

NARRATOR: Despite the children's deaths,

Frei and Freireich had
seen pronounced declines

in white blood cell counts,
a clear sign that

the toxic chemicals were having
an effect on the disease.

Encouraged, they pushed even harder.

If two drugs were better than one,

then four must be better than two.

In 1962, they launched
a trial called vamp.

MUKHERJEE: Vamp was an acronym

for 4 individual chemotherapy drugs,

and they had all been chosen

because the theory was

that each of them had a different pattern

of attacking cellular growth.

It would be synergistic,
and it would therefore

kill all cancer cells, drive the
cancer cells down to zero,

and therefore completely cure the cancer.

NARRATOR: On September 24, 1962,

Frei and Freireich began treating

the first group of children
in the vamp trial.

There were 16 of them...
10 girls and 6 boys.

Researchers at the NCI
were deeply divided.

Some believed that vamp
was going too far.

If two drug combinations
had caused children

to bleed to death,
what would four drugs do?

FREIREICH: We're a bunch of
young bucks who know nothing.

Everybody thinks we're
experimenting on the kids.

They're worried about
Buchenwald and horrors...

But when you understand something,

you understand it, no matter
what people say, you know?

I was looking at it.

I understood it.

I counted the cells.
I took care of the children.

I knew it was right.

"You're wrong, Freireich."

Well, I mean, how the hell
do you know I'm wrong?

I mean, I know what I'm doing.

Tinkle, tinkle!

There you go, darling.

NARRATOR: Olivia Blair has
responded extremely well

to her first month of chemotherapy,

and she is now in remission.

Bye!

Say thank you. Blow kisses?

You're welcome.

Do you see the difference
in her since the beginning?

KELLY [VOICE]: She's just
so strong and so resilient.

It's just amazing. If I had been through

half of the stuff that
she's been through,

I would be in bed, like,
"don't talk to me.

Please don't talk to me."

MAN: Hi, guys. How you doing?

NARRATOR: Although Olivia's
doctors are encouraged

by her early response,

they remain concerned with
the possibility of a relapse.

What's he doing?

MARCUS [VOICE]: When you
hear that word remission,

you think that that means she's cured,

and so that's a common misconception.

Do you like this light?

It just means that they can't see it.

NARRATOR: The doctors are
recommending Olivia be

enrolled in a clinical trial

of yet another chemotherapy
drug, called Nelarabine.

There you go!

SISON: A lot of people know

that leukemia in kids is curable.

When we present the idea of
a clinical trial to parents,

they understand that this is

how we got to where we are today.

They understand we're not
necessarily "experimenting"

on their child, that we're
actually taking

the best-known treatment
and trying to make it better.

MAN: So, at this point, Olivia is in

the category of intermediate risk.

What's MRD?

SISON: MRD is minimal residual disease,

so that's the amount of leukemia
that we could detect

or not detect at her day 29 bone marrow

from Monday, so her MRD is 0.0.

It's the absolute best result
we could have hoped for. OK?

Great. Wonderful.

All right.

Now where do we go?

We know that patients,

even when they're MRD negative,

have leukemia somewhere in their body,

and if we don't continue treatment

with an intense regimen
like we're planning,

then it will come back.

And the question is,

does she receive Nelarabine? OK?

We don't know if it
helps, and even if it helps,

we don't know if it's
worth the side effects

that you could potentially
have from Nelarabine...

Nausea, tiredness,
fever, decreased counts,

and then, less likely,

fast heartbeat, blurred vision,

pain in the eye, pain in the abdomen,

sores in the lining of the throat...

SISON [VOICE]: So, all of
the treatments that we give

have significant
and severe side effects...

Increases in Bilirubin, infection...

But again, it's one of those decisions

of balancing a patient's life

versus the side effects
that the treatment will give.

Muscle damage that also
can then damage the kidney,

problems with breaking
down carbohydrates, also,

that would cause
inflammation in the pancreas.

[OLIVIA CRYING]

As you can see, the list is long.

This is probably the hardest
decision along the way

that you guys have to make.

How do we find out if
they get the Nelarabine?

How do you find that out?

It's random... it's randomized, right?

SISON: There's a formula that spits out,

"OK, the next patient that
consents is gonna get it,

and this one's not going to get it."

That's like...

I don't... I don't...

I don't feel comfortable with that.

The thought of your child's treatment

being left up to a computer

is a very hard concept to take.

MARCUS [VOICE]: When you're making

those type of decisions,

of course you want it to
be the right thing for her.

And it's OK if you decide
not to be in the study.

MARCUS: So you just try
the best you can as a parent

to learn as much as you can

to make an informed decision,

but you never know.

It's 1-10% on the...

On the highest.

I know we all want to
do what's best for Livy.

Yeah. I don't know what to say.

[CLEARS THROAT]

Lord, what we ask for you
right now, father,

is just to kind of nudge us
in the right direction, lord,

and put us at ease and at peace

with the decision that's ultimately made,

and we just humbly ask for your guidance

in making this decision, lord.

Um... amen.

In Jesus' name.

Amen. amen.

WOMAN: 1963. That's when
I first felt sick.

I was in junior high school,

and we were living on eastern Avenue,

and we were walking down to the beach,

my sister and my friends,
and, um... I was tired.

I really felt tired.

You know? It wasn't like the measles

or, you know, chickenpox.

Usually that would go away,

but this just didn't go away.

It just got worse.

NARRATOR: Karen lord was 13 years old

when she was diagnosed

with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

In June, 1964, with her health declining,

she was taken to a hospital in Boston,

where she was quickly put
on the 4-drug vamp regimen

first tried at the NCI by
Tom Frei and Jay Freireich.

LORD: My doctor just decided
that I would not know.

They just didn't talk about it.

They just would say,
"here's your daily cocktail,"

but they wouldn't say
the word chemotherapy.

I called the treatment
my Martini time with the IV.

Yeah. We'd joke about it,
the nurses and I.

"Oh, it's Martini time again."

When I had first entered
the hospital, I was 108,

and I went down to 50 pounds.

For a year, I was mostly in bed,

and I just would be in a
fetal position most of the time.

NARRATOR: The chemotherapy
caused severe nerve damage

and made Karen so delirious at times

that she had to be forcibly restrained.

She became addicted to morphine

and for months hovered near death.

LORD: I remember the priest coming in,

and he had this purple
scarf around his neck,

and he had this little cross,
and he would pray,

and he didn't tell me I had
the last rites of the church,

but I knew it, and I
had it 3 times, so...

Sometimes the pain was so bad,

it would have been better if
I did go to the other side.

NARRATOR: Gradually, though,
the drugs began to work.

Lord slowly recovered.

After 12 months of treatment,

she was ready to return
to school and a normal life,

one of the first children
ever cured of leukemia.

LORD: When I went back
to the high school,

they all thought I died,

and they says, "ooh,
we thought you were dead,"

but I says, "no, I'm not dead.

I'm here, and I'm back in school."

NARRATOR: Other children
in the vamp study

also began to see the tide
of white blood cells

created by their leukemia slowly recede.

MUKHERJEE: Incredibly,
some of the children

actually began to recover,

and when they did bone marrow biopsies,

they began to find that
in fact, the cancer had

gone into a profound remission...

A remission so profound,
so deep in leukemia

that you couldn't find
a single abnormal cancer cell

inside any of these bone marrows.

NARRATOR: Though still
the minority of cases,

these were not the fleeting
remissions of Farber's trials.

These lasted.

FREIREICH: The breakthrough
of vamp was, number one,

the concept that a systemic
cancer could be cured.

From that point forward,

cancer research was totally transformed,

because now, people who said,
"you can't cure cancer.

You're finished."

We can cure cancer,
at least childhood leukemia.

NARRATOR: Despite its intense toxicity,

the success of combination
chemotherapy suggested

that it might be possible
to use the same strategy

against much more common varieties,

such as breast and lung cancer,

even after they had spread.

Dr. Farber, how do you think cancer

will eventually be controlled?

I think that cancer will be controlled,

eventually, by chemical means.

NARRATOR: From his office
at the Jimmy Fund clinic,

Sidney Farber had followed
the multi-drug trials at the NCI

with a mixture of pride and apprehension.

His experiments with Aminopterin

had inspired Frei and Freireich's work,

yet for Farber, the suffering
inflicted on children

by these trials crossed a line

beyond which he would not go.

Younger scientists did not
share Farber's apprehension.

Even David Nathan, once a skeptic,

was now converted to high-dose
combination chemotherapy.

NATHAN: By that time,
about 30% or so of the children

were surviving with
combination chemotherapy,

and as far as I could tell,
there were no survivors

in patients with the chemotherapy

that Sidney wanted to do.

NARRATOR: In 1968, after leaving the NCI

for Boston children's hospital,
Nathan made the trip

to the Jimmy Fund building
to confront Farber.

NATHAN: I go into the room,

and there he is in his white coat,

and I start right away and say,
"you know, I really feel

"so strongly about
combination chemotherapy,

"and I feel as a physician

"that I cannot refer the patients to you

if you won't adopt it."

Well, he absolutely flew into a rage.

He really shouted at me

and simply said, "get out of here.

I'll never see you again,"

and I realized I never
would see him again.

He really hated to hurt a child,
and that dominated him.

I had to say to him,
"look, isn't it better

to try to cure one out of three?"

And I can still hear him saying,

"I will not injure
two children to save one."

NARRATOR: It's been 40 days

since Luca Assante's transplant,
and the latest results

from his bone marrow biopsy
have just come in.

So how was his bone marrow test?

They did a good job?

They didn't see any leukemia cells.

That's great news.

You deserve some good
news once in a while.

Yes, we do. That is good news.

NARRATOR: Luca's new immune system,

transplanted from his sister,
has taken over

and is producing healthy blood cells

that have driven his
cancer into remission.

What about the rest of the things?

I mean, the Bilirubin went up.

Yeah. So the only negative thing

is that the Bilirubin went up some.

NARRATOR: But the new immune cells

are continuing to attack
Luca's liver in what is now

a full-blown case of
graft-versus-host disease.

I can't spin that into a positive thing.

Oh, my god. Something else?

We don't need anything else, OK?

We've had enough.

The virus piece is better,
but he's not all better.

So we have no recommendations for

any changes today...
Just more of the same.

More of the same is good.

LOEB: I think that the reason

that he's not all better is because of

the graft-versus-host disease,

so hopefully, we'll make
that piece better, too.

NARRATOR: After 20 days

in the pediatric intensive care unit,

Luca has become critically ill.

LUCY: The worst feeling is
not being able to hold him.

You can't physically, like,
hug him the way you want to.

Luca, look. Your soccer coach

just emailed mommy about you.

He wants to know, are you
gonna be able to go play soccer?

You want to go play soccer
when you get back home?

LUCY [VOICE]: I hadn't heard
my kid talk in 20 days.

So I haven't heard him
say "mommy" in 20 days.

That's pretty tough.

But I have my husband here with me,

and we don't leave Luca at all,
so he knows we're there.

Sometimes people think
you're stronger than

what you really are, but I feel strong

because I'm fighting with Luca,

and I'm not going to let him fight alone.

Good job!

You want to put this on the side?

You play later? Or you want to play?

NARRATOR: Luca's doctors
were not able to reverse

the course of his disease.

Two months later, he died at home,

surrounded by his family.

Luca was 6 years old.

LOEB: We're still in an era

where we give kids
treatment to fix one tumor,

and it has the chance of causing another.

I don't regret giving him those drugs

because if we hadn't
given him those drugs,

he would have died at age 2 instead of 6,

but it's still bothersome
to know that the drugs

that we gave him to treat his first tumor

ultimately caused him to die as a child.

There are still parts of his case

that none of us really
understand very well.

I'm sure that we're going
to spend a lot of time

trying to understand what happened,

because if we can
understand what happened,

then maybe we can do something
different next time,

and the next kid won't have this happen.

Dr. Farber, it gives me great joy

to give you the American
cancer society's high honor,

its gold sword.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: By the late 1960s,

Sidney Farber and Mary Lasker's
campaign to cure cancer

seemed more urgent than ever.

Lasker continued to take
her fight to Congress

and to lobby her close friend
in the white house,

Lyndon Johnson.

GUTTERMAN: One time, a year
before Johnson left office,

Mary went to the white house
because she wanted

an additional $100 million appropriated

for cancer research,

and so she's in the oval office,

and Lyndon's complaining
about everything.

The Vietnam war is still raging.

"Mary, I just can't do it.

$100 million!"

And she said, "Lyndon you have to.

We're getting progress now."

And Lyndon was a bit of
a flirt, as we all know,

and he put his hand on her knee and said,

"Mary, how badly do you want
that 100 million?"

And she not so gently lifted
his hand off her knee and said,

"lady bird is my best
friend in the world.

Now, am I going to get that 100 million?"

And he said, "you got it Mary."

MAN: Hello, "eagle." Houston.

We're standing by. Over.

[BEEP]

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1969,

Americans walked on the moon.

National faith in science soared.

Roger. The Eva is
progressing beautifully.

They're setting up the flag now.

NARRATOR: The moon landing
was the result of

a close partnership between
science and government.

If such a partnership
could conquer space,

Farber and Lasker wondered,

why could it not conquer cancer?

I, Richard Milhous Nixon,
do solemnly swear...

NARRATOR: There was a new
president in office now,

and they set out to enlist him
and the American public

in a campaign far more massive

than had ever been seen before...

A conquest, as Mary Lasker
put it, of inner space.

MUKHERJEE: In December 1969,

if you woke up and you opened
"the New York Times,"

you would find a very different
kind of advertisement...

Not for a product that you could buy,

but for something that
the nation should buy,

and that was for a war on cancer.

GROOPMAN: The advertising
was a juggernaut.

They said, here it is.

Many people won't utter the word.

We're saying it in "the New York Times,"

we're saying it to the president
of the United States,

and we are going to mobilize
a national effort

with a promise that this horrific disease

"will be eradicated."

NARRATOR: On march 9, 1971,

senators Edward Kennedy, a democrat,

and Jacob Javits, a republican,

introduced a bill calling
for $400 million

in federal funds to fight cancer.

Lasker lobbied her many
friends on Capitol Hill,

refusing to take no for an answer.

GUTTERMAN: Mary's skills
when she went to Congress

were a sight to behold.

There was no time for small talk.

She would say, "I'm just
here on one issue."

Many of them would complain,
look at their watches...

"I know what you want,

but, you know, we got all these bills."

And she said, "but what about your wife?

I understand your wife has cancer."

"Yeah, that's unfortunate."

"Well, how do you think
she's going to get better?

Can I count on you?"

NARRATOR: "the iron is hot,"
Farber had written Lasker.

"This is the time to
pound without cessation."

Lasker turned to her friend,

the newspaper columnist Ann Landers,

to urge her readers to
write their Congressmen.

Landers' column ran on April 20.

Within days, mountains
of mail were piling up

in Capitol Hill mailrooms.

BLAIR: The outpouring
was beyond imagination.

Hubert Humphrey called up Mary and said,

"you've got to give me another secretary.

I have 60,000 letters in my office."

NARRATOR: Thanks to Farber and Lasker,

cancer was no longer a disease
to be hushed up or hidden.

"To oppose big spending against cancer,"

one observer said,

was now to "oppose mom,
apple pie, and the flag."

With this groundswell,

the senate passed
the national cancer act, 79-1;

The house, 350-5.

Members of the senate,
members of the house,

ladies and gentleman,
we are here today for

the purpose of signing
the cancer act of 1971,

and I hope that in the years ahead

that we may look back
on this day and this action

as being the most
significant action taken

during this administration.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: The passage of the act

provided funding for cancer
prevention and research

that dwarfed anything that
had been raised before...

$1.6 billion in the first 3 years alone.

GROOPMAN: The national cancer act

was a paradigm change.

It was the selling of a dream,

to not only look to government
for the kinds of sums

which would be very hard to raise

even with the most generous
of philanthropists,

but also to create an entity
based on a promise,

and that was the cure of cancer.

NARRATOR: Today, more than half a century

after Sidney Farber's
first chemotherapy trials,

childhood leukemia has a
survival rate of nearly 90%.

The era of bold and
ceaseless experimentation,

borne mostly by children,

led to the most elusive
of achievements... a cure.

BROWN: Every time you can chip
off a little bit of uncertainty

and make the right answers more clear,

in any aspect of the
clinical care that we give,

it's gratifying.

If you look 50 years ago,
it was all uncertainty.

Now there are certain things
that we know are effective,

where the right thing to do is so clear.

The more that we can
chip those things away

and put them into that category,

the less humbled we're all going to feel.

Olivia!

What do you think?

Oh, I know. This is cute.

NARRATOR: For Olivia Blair,

almost a year after her diagnosis,

her cancer remains in full remission.

I love you.

KELLY [VOICE]: We don't want her to know

that something's really wrong with her,

because she has no idea
what's going on right now.

Where's Livy?

She's so young. She's not
going to remember this.

Boo!

Boo! Peek-a-boo!

There you go.

KELLY [VOICE]: She's going to beat this.

She's going to be 32 years old,

and she's going to be proud
to show her port scar

and say "look at me."

Where's Petey?

I...

Just don't want to think
the worst anymore.

I just want to think the best, and...

Just enjoy the time
that we have with her.

Where you want to go?

Come on.

NARRATOR: In the late
afternoon of march 30, 1973,

an emergency signal sounded

throughout the Jimmy Fund
clinic in Boston.

Doctors and nurses raced

toward the director's
eighth-floor office.

They found Sidney Farber with
his face resting on his desk,

dead from a massive heart attack.

FARBER: In some ways,
my father was remarkably lucky

to be able to work
until the moment he died.

To be in that environment,
to still be pursuing his dream,

he was a very fortunate man.

He wouldn't have used
this language, maybe,

but I would say he was blessed.

NARRATOR: Farber was survived
by a handful of the children

he had treated at the Jimmy Fund clinic,

including "Jimmy" himself,
Einar Gustafson,

who would live to the age of 65.

Farber himself had not lived to see how

the war on cancer he had helped
bring about was waged,

but his friend and partner
Mary Lasker believed

victory might now be less
than a decade away,

and she had reasons for her optimism.

She and Farber had helped turn cancer

from a subject no one
wanted to talk about

into a national priority.

The full force of the American government

was now enlisted in the struggle.

NIXON: It will not fail
because of lack of money.

If $100 million this year is not enough,

we will provide more money.

NARRATOR: New techniques
in surgery and radiation

were now being used effectively

against a variety of cancers,

and researchers had discovered
chemicals that could

kill malignant cells
no matter where they spread.

To some in the cancer community,
the challenge now seemed

simply to find the right
combination of chemicals

to combat each kind of cancer.

But despite these initial triumphs,

the war on cancer would stretch on

for 3 decades and more,

and those who fought it
would find themselves engaged

on a 1,000 battlefields

against an elusive and resilient enemy...

The cancer cell itself,

whose true nature no one
yet fully understood.

Until that mystery was solved,

victory could never be won.

ANNOUNCER: This program is made
possible by Genentech,

dedicated to making a difference
in patients' lives

around the world.

And by cancer treatment
centers of America,

providing integrative treatment
for over 25 years.

By Siemens, a heritage of innovation,

a passion for life.

By David H. Koch.

By Bristol-Myers Squibb,

committed to the science
of immuno-oncology.

By the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program

to enhance public understanding
of science, technology,

and economics.

By the Kovler Fund,

pursuing solutions for
America's neglected needs.

By the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

And by the American Association
for Cancer Research.

By American Cancer Society.

By the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

By the Entertainment Industry Foundation.

By Stand Up To Cancer.

By the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting

and by the generous contributions

to this PBS station
from viewers like you.