Available at local bookstores or Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey

Fifty years ago, childhood leukemia was always fatal. Though the number of new cases has remained largely unchanged, what has changed is the outcome. In the United States, instead of 2,140 deaths of children with leukemia under the age of fifteen in 1961, there were 610 deaths in 1991, and the figures are improving every year. Today, over 75 percent of children with leukemia can be cured. Yet no one can put a specific date on the cure of leukemia or say which child was the first to live rather than die. Even the doctors and scientists most responsible were astonished to realize that they had reached their goal.

Dr. John Laszlo tells the story of this monumental victory over cancer through the voices of nine doctors and researcher:

• Emil J Freireich and Emil Frei, two brash young physicians who pioneer chemotherapy and platelet transfusions for their young patients at the brand new National Cancer Institute, often in the face of hostile bosses and colleagues;

• their mentor, C. Gordon Zubrod, the savvy physician-administrator who backed their hunches while insisting on rigorous experimental proof;

• Joe Burchenal, who helped transform the weapons of chemical warfare into cancer chemotherapy;

• the chemists George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing designer drugs against leukemia and a host of other diseases;

• Howard Skipper, whose research on leukemia in mice yielded fundamental insights into the requirements for curing human leukemia with drugs;

• Jim Holland, who coordinated the cooperative clinical trials that made leukemia the first disease to be studied systematically using the highest standards of scientific method;

• Donald Pinkel, the pediatrician who made St. Jude's Hospital a premier treatment center for childhood leukemia and whose radiation therapy clinched the possibility of a cure.

Dr. John Laszlo, National Vice President for Research at the American Cancer Society , has seen the progress toward a cure for leukemia firsthand as a clinician and a medical researcher. He was the first volunteer to try out a new blood cell separator and among the first physicians to use the machine to save the life of a leukemia patient--an experience he relates in this book. He is the author of Understanding Cancer, and he is a survivor of his own bout with cancer. He is donating all royalties to the American Cancer Society.

What people have said about this book:

"My father would have loved this book. With clarity and inspiration, it tells the story of the pioneering doctors and scientists who have battled so successfully against what was once an inescapably fatal cancer, childhood leukemia. Dr. Laszlo has written an adventure story that lets us hope for the happy ending Danny Thomas promised--a cure--so that no childhood will ever again be lost to this disease."
--Marlo Thomas

"Dr. John Laszlo is a rare breed--a kind and caring physician, an excellent listener and good communicator . . . and superb researcher."
--Joe and Teresa Graedon, authors of The People's Pharmacy books and syndicated newspaper column

"Provides vivid testimony to the fact that major scientific advances come not from great strategic plans but rather from the quirky accidents of nature, from leaps of intuition, from the determination of a few to forge ahead in spite of ample evidence that their hopes for progress will forever be nothing more than pipe dreams."
--Robert A. Weinberg, Ph.D., Whitehead Institute, MIT

Credits:
Jacket design by Ellen C. Dawson
Jacket photo: Children with cancer at Camp Catch-A-Rainbow, Big Blue Lake, Montague Michigan, a program of the Michigan Division of the American Cancer Society. Photographer Laura Sikes; courtesy of the American Cancer Society.

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