Sidney Farber and Lifting the Shame of Cancer
By Molly McGuiness
The idea seemed unthinkable: Inject children who are already gravely ill with a potent poison in an attempt to make them better.
In 1947, a leukemia diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence. It could kill a healthy child in just a few months.
Sidney Farber, MD, a pathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, who had seen too many children’s lives cut short by this relentless disease, thought the answer may lie in subjecting his young patients to a rare and possibly dangerous compound called aminopterin.
His experiment worked. The drug starved white blood cells of crucial nutrients and poisoned the cancer, resulting in an unknown concept for these children — remission. It was the beginning of chemotherapy.
Farber is one of the many unsung heroes of cancer research whose story is told in the new PBS film, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” a six-hour, three-part documentary series, presented by Ken Burns and based on the book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD.
Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric sat down with Burns and Mukherjee to talk about the scientists and advocates who pushed cancer research forward and helped lift the shame of this devastating disease.
With hope on the horizon, Farber began a personal crusade to fund cancer research. At the time, cancer was not only considered incurable, but also it was considered a contamination. To lift the stigma and raise money to treat the disease, Farber knew he needed to put a human face on it.
He did that with a 12-year-old boy named Einar Gustafson. Farber referred to him as “Jimmy” to protect his identity and broaden his appeal, and this changed how Americans saw the disease. “Cancer was not some abstraction that we couldn’t talk about or 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 the Children’s Hospital fund for cancer. They were sending money directly to Jimmy,” Mukherjee explains.
By the summer of 1952, the Jimmy Fund was growing, and Farber’s dream for a hospital for children with cancer, Jimmy’s Clinic, had been realized. But to wage a full-scale war against this formidable disease, he needed a powerful ally. He found one in Mary Lasker.
"She’s a central figure in all this, though not a scientist. She’s a socialite, but she realizes that what cancer needs more than anything else is it needs money. And it needs attention,” says Burns. “This is a time when we put people in the attic when they had cancer. We just didn’t talk about it. And she was bringing it out into the fresh air and lobbying congressmen and getting money so that somebody like Sidney Farber would not have to constantly be raising money, that she could give him money, that he could begin to make the discoveries.”
Lasker and Farber, together, with masterful advertising campaigns and elaborate fundraising efforts brought cancer awareness to the forefront… and to the White House.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, authorizing the spending of $1.5 billion toward cancer research over the next three years.
As of today, the Jimmy Fund has raised over $1 billion for cancer care and research. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is one of the world leaders in cancer treatment, and the American Cancer Society, the fledgling organization Lasker took over in 1944, is the largest voluntary health organization in the U.S.
Together with other researchers and advocates who dared to push the boundaries of science and challenge how the world perceived cancer, Farber and Lasker laid the foundation for a war that was meant to be won, and paved the way for the generations who would continue to fight it.
