When Cancer Was Conquerable

To win the war on cancer, we must recapture the bold spirit of the early days of discovery.

- Sarah Constantin

The first attempt to treat cancer in humans with chemotherapy happened within days of doctors realizing that it reduced the size of tumors in mice.

The year was 1942, and we were at war. Yale pharmacologist Alfred Gilman was serving as chief of the pharmacology section in the Army Medical Division at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, working on developing antidotes to nerve gases and other chemical weapons the Army feared would be used against American troops.

After a few months of researching mustard gas in mice, Gilman and his collaborator, Louis S. Goodman, noticed that the poison also caused a regression of cancer in the rodents. Just a few days later, they persuaded a professor of surgery at Yale to run a clinical trial on a patient with terminal cancer; within 48 hours, the patient’s tumors had receded.

In 1971, three decades after Gilman’s discovery, the U.S. government declared a “war on cancer.” Since then, we have spent nearly $200 billion in federal money on research to defeat the disease. But we haven’t gotten much bang for our buck: Cancer deaths have fallen by a total of just 5 percent since 1950. (In comparison, heart disease deaths are a third of what they were then, thanks to innovations like statins, stents, and bypass surgery.) The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 600,000 Americans die of cancer annually; 33 percent of those diagnosed will be dead within five years.