Linda at her mother's apartment
Friendship Village, Kalamazoo, Michigan
I dare you to read this book! I double-dare you! I don’t think you have the guts!
The book in question was written by Dr. Steven Rosenberg,
long-time leader and resident star of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Steve, as we are told to call him, is about
78 years old at this writing (2018) and still working, as far as I can
determine. OId cancer researchers never
retire, it seems – they just die in the saddle, riding resolutely into the
unknown. Good for them! Steve was aided in the assembly of this book
by John M. Barry, a professional science writer and author of a moderately
good
book on the enormously lethal flu epidemic of the early 20th century. I have been profiting from Barry book, but I
set it aside to reread The Transformed
Cell to prepare for writing this review.
I’m glad I did; I came to understand a lot of stuff the second time
through that had mystified me on original encounter. Maybe if I try it a third time I will figure
out what in heck LAK cells are.
This book is largely an account of Steve’s professional
development from childhood to the 1990s, when the book was written. Steve is, to say the least, not an ordinary
guy. In addition to being smarter than
the rest of us, he works a heck of a lot harder. He also has an unprecidented ability to withstand,
learn from, and rebound from a host of calamitous failures. If I had experienced even 10% of the crushing
setbacks he has endured I would have crawled under my desk, sucked my thumb for a
week or so – and then taken up professional bowling. Not Steve: he kept right at it, for decades –
and finally was one of the midwives – possibly the most important midwife – at
the birth of modern immunotherapy.
So, anyway, the book begins with Steve, as a young doctor
working for the VA, encountering a gritty old cuss named James DeAngelo, who
had once been riddled with intractable cancer and sent home to die – but didn’t. Steve groped long and hard for an explanation
that made sense within the context of 1960s medicine, but couldn’t find
one. The only possibility seemed to be
that Mr. DeAngelo’s immune system had turned on the tumor, and killed it. At the time that was considered impossible;
cancer cells were “self”, and the immune system only attacked “non-self”. Dr. Steven Rosenberg was driven to the
suspicion that this wasn’t entirely true.
He spent the rest of his career working on a solution to what might be
called the DeAngelo conundrum. And, by God, he found it.
This book conducts you through the history of Rosenberg’s
tussle with immunotherapy, beginning with a simple attempt to save a dying
cancer victim by giving him a shot of James DeAngelo’s blood – to, decades
later, experimenting with immune system cells “transformed” by modifying their
DNA using retroviruses. The trek from transfusion
to “transduction” is too long and convolute to attempt to summarize here. You should buy the book (<$5.00 at
Abebooks) and spend some serious time with it.
You will learn a lot of important stuff – especially if you read it
twice.
So why do I think you ain’t got the guts to stick with this
book? Well, it’s because much of the
story involves people you get to know and care about – all of whom die. For decades, they all die. Dozens of them. (Not to mention, of course, thousands of mice.) It is hard on the reader. What must it have been like on Rosenberg and
his team?
I can’t help but end with a personal note. This book was published in 1992. Linda died of ovarian cancer in 2011 – 19 years
later. During her struggles with the
disease nobody ever breathed the word “immunotherapy”, nor suggested any kind
of clinical trial. Linda would tell me
to let all that go, so I will try.
