The Emperor of All Maladies. Siddhartha Mukherjee
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too late. At the society’s annual meeting in 1945, after a bitter showdown with the “laymen,” he was forced to resign.
With Little deposed and the board replaced, Foote and Lasker were unstoppable. The society’s bylaws and constitution were rewritten281 with nearly vengeful swiftness to accommodate the takeover, once again emphasizing its lobbying and fund-raising activities. In a telegram to Mary Lasker, Jim Adams, the president of the Standard Corporation (and one of the chief instigators of the Lay Group), laid out the new rules, arguably among the more unusual set of stipulations to be adopted by a scientific organization: “The Committee should not include282 more than four professional and scientific members. The Chief Executive should be a layman.”
In those two sentences, Adams epitomized the extraordinary change that had swept through the ACS. The society was now a high-stakes juggernaut spearheaded by a band of fiery “laymen” activists to raise money and publicity for a medical campaign. Lasker was the center of this collective, its nucleating force, its queen bee. Collectively, the activists began to be known as the “Laskerites” in the media. It was a name that they embraced with pride.
In five years, Mary Lasker had raised the cancer society from the dead. Her “shorter-range pressure group” was working in full force. The Laskerites now had their long-range target: Congress. If they could obtain federal backing for a War on Cancer, then the scale and scope of their campaign would be astronomically multiplied.
“You were probably the first person283 to realize that the War against Cancer has to be fought first on the floor of Congress—in order to continue the fight in laboratories and hospitals,” the breast cancer patient and activist Rose Kushner once wrote admiringly to Mary Lasker. But cannily, Lasker grasped an even more essential truth: that the fight had to begin in the lab before being brought to Congress. She needed yet another ally—someone from the world of science to initiate a fight for science funding. The War on Cancer needed a bona fide scientific sponsor among all the advertisers and lobbyists—a real doctor to legitimize the spin doctors. The person in question would need to understand the Laskerites’ political priorities almost instinctually, then back them up with unquestionable and unimpeachable scientific authority. Ideally, he or she would be immersed in cancer research, yet willing to emerge out of that immersion to occupy a much larger national arena. The one man—and perhaps the only man—who could possibly fit the role was Sidney Farber.
In fact, their needs were perfectly congruent: Farber needed a political lobbyist as urgently as the Laskerites needed a scientific strategist. It was like the meeting of two stranded travelers, each carrying one-half of a map.
Farber and Mary Lasker met in Washington in late 1940s, not long after Farber had shot to national fame with his antifolates. In the winter of 1948, barely a few months after Farber’s paper on antifolates had been published, John Heller, the director of the NCI, wrote to Lasker introducing her to the idea of chemotherapy and to the doctor who had dreamed up the notion in Boston. The idea of chemotherapy—a chemical that could cure cancer outright (“a penicillin for cancer,”284 as the oncologist Dusty Rhoads at Memorial Hospital liked to describe it)—fascinated Lasker. By the early 1950s, she was regularly285 corresponding with Farber about such drugs. Farber wrote back long, detailed, meandering letters—“scientific treatises,”286 he called them—educating her on his progress in Boston.
For Farber, the burgeoning relationship with Lasker had a cleansing, clarifying quality—“a catharsis,” as he called it. He unloaded his scientific knowledge on her, but more important, he also unloaded his scientific and political ambition, an ambition he found easily reflected, even magnified, in her eyes. By the mid-1950s, the scope of their letters had considerably broadened: Farber and Lasker openly broached the possibility of launching an all-out, coordinated attack on cancer. “An organizational pattern is developing287 at a much more rapid rate than I could have hoped,” Farber wrote. He spoke about his visits to Washington to try to reorganize the National Cancer Institute into a more potent and directed force against cancer.
Lasker was already a “regular on the Hill,”288 as one doctor described her—her face, with its shellacked frieze of hair, and her hallmark gray suit and pearls omnipresent on every committee and focus group related to health care. Farber, too, was now becoming a “regular.” Dressed perfectly for his part in a crisp, dark suit, his egghead reading-glasses often perched at the edge of his nose, he was a congressman’s spitting image of a physician-scientist. He possessed an “evangelistic pizzazz” for medical science, an observer recalled. “Put a tambourine in [his] hands”289 and he would immediately “go to work.”
To Farber’s evangelistic tambourine, Lasker added her own drumbeats of enthusiasm. She spoke and wrote passionately and confidently about her cause, emphasizing her points with quotes and questions. Back in New York, she employed a retinue of assistants to scour newspapers and magazines and clip out articles containing even a passing reference to cancer—all of which she read, annotated on the margins with questions in small, precise script, and distributed to the other Laskerites every week.
“I have written to you so many times290 in what is becoming a favorite technique—mental telepathy,” Farber wrote affectionately to Lasker, “but such letters are never mailed.” As acquaintance bloomed into familiarity, and familiarity into friendship, Farber and Lasker struck up a synergistic partnership that would stretch over decades. In a letter written in 1954, Farber used the word crusade to describe their campaign against cancer. The word was deeply symbolic. For Sidney Farber, as for Mary Lasker, the cancer campaign was indeed turning into a “crusade,” a scientific battle imbued with such fanatical intensity that only a religious metaphor could capture its essence. It was as if they had stumbled upon an unshakable, fixed vision of a cure—and they would stop at nothing to drag even a reluctant nation toward it.
“These new friends of chemotherapy”
The death of a man291 is like the fall of a mighty nation
That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets,
And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas
But now it will not relieve any besieged city
It will not enter into an alliance
—Czeslaw Milosz, “The Fall”
I had recently begun to notice292 that events outside science, such as Mary Lasker’s cocktail parties or Sidney Farber’s Jimmy Fund, had something to do with the setting of science policy.
—Robert Morison
In 1951, as Farber and Lasker were communicating with “telepathic” intensity about a campaign against cancer, a seminal event drastically altered the tone and urgency of their efforts. Albert Lasker was diagnosed with colon cancer. Surgeons in New York heroically tried to remove the tumor, but the lymph nodes around the intestines were widely involved, and there was little that could be done surgically. By February 1952, Albert was confined293 to the hospital, numb with the shock of diagnosis and awaiting death.
The sardonic twist of this event