The Cancer History Project

Something felt wrong during one of Morhaf Al Achkar’s regular runs on the treadmill in late 2016. He started gasping for breath.

“It became really hard to run,” he said. “That sudden development of shortness of breath alarmed me.”

Being a family physician in Indiana at the time, he asked a resident at the clinic where he worked to listen to his lungs. “There’s no air moving on the left side of your chest—that doesn’t seem right,” Al Achkar recalled hearing from the resident.

A few weeks later, Al Achkar received devastating news: he had stage 4 ALK-positive lung cancer. He estimated that he would live for just another six to 10 months.

But today—nearly eight years after his devastating diagnosis—Al Achkar is still working, now primarily as a researcher and educator.

Al Achkar spoke with Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

When Stephanie Graff was a breast oncology fellow in 2010, one of her patients brought a marked up copy of “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” to an appointment.

“One of my patients had brought it in and was using it almost as her cancer notebook, and had pages flagged and said, ’Well, what about this? What about this? It says here…,’” Graff, director of Breast Oncology at Lifespan Cancer Institute and medical advisor for the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, said to The Cancer Letter.

It was the first time that the book, written by Susan Love, a breast cancer surgeon, activist, and founder of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, had shown up on Graff’s radar.

“Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” was first published in 1990. Now, Graff is a contributing author of the seventh edition, the most recent version of the book published in 2023.

Soon after he was diagnosed with a dedifferentiated liposarcoma, C. Norman Coleman reached out to The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project to initiate a series of interviews about his life and career.

The plan was to keep going for as long as possible. Alas, only one interview–about an hour’s worth–got done. Coleman spoke with Otis Brawley and Paul Goldberg, co-editors of the Cancer History Project.

Coleman died March 1 at 79.

At NCI, Coleman was the associate director of the Radiation Research Program, senior investigator in the Radiation Oncology Branch in the Center for Cancer Research, and leader of a research laboratory at NIH. He was also the founder of the International Cancer Expert Corps, a non-profit he created to provide mentorship to cancer professionals in low- and middle-income countries and in regions with indigenous populations in upper-income countries.

In 1964, the Office of the Surgeon General issued a report on smoking and health that ended a debate that had raged for decades—stating that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases.

Sixty years later, Alan Blum, professor and Gerald Leon Wallace M.D. Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama, as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, sits down with Donald S. Shopland, an original member of the staff of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General upon its formation in 1962.

Since 1962, Shopland has served as an editor of 17 reports of the surgeon general on smoking and health, as interim director of the Office on Smoking and Health for two years in the 1980s, and as an advisor on smoking and health at NCI. He retired in 2014.

George Santos, founder of Johns Hopkins University Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, pioneered many of the innovations used in bone marrow transplantation that are relevant today—but he didn’t get nearly as much credit as others working in the field.

Richard J. Jones, professor of oncology and medicine, director of the Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, and co-director, Hematologic Malignancies Program, at The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, spoke with the Cancer History Project about George Santos's legacy.

“Much of what we’re currently doing in bone marrow transplant internationally was developed by George,” Jones said.

In this episode, Judith L. Pearson, best-selling author and founder of A 2nd Act, speaks with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor with the Cancer History Project.

At age 18, during basic training in Fort Polk, Louisiana, Chris Lundy slipped and broke his wrist.

At the hospital, the doctors set his wrist and ran some blood tests. What Lundy thought would be a simple visit turned into a series of months-long hospital stays.

Lundy was diagnosed with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, and his doctors sent him to Seattle, where he would become a patient of Donnall Thomas. Thomas would share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease.

Today, Lundy is the longest living recipient of an allogeneic transplant for aplastic anemia at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He received the bone marrow transplant that saved his life in 1971.

In this interview, Chris and his brother, Jerry Lundy, speak with Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an oncologist at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Doroshow, who is also a historian of medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the Cancer History Project.

John Laszlo, professor emeritus at Duke University Medical Center and former national vice president for research at the American Cancer Society, speaks with the Cancer History Project’s Alex Carolan and Paul Goldberg about his life, career, and his authoritative book, “The Cure of Childhood Leukemia: Into the Age of Miracles.”

When Laszlo, 92, joined the Acute Leukemia Service at NCI in 1956, the cure for childhood leukemia seemed beyond reach. He worked directly with Emil “Tom” Frei, and Emil J Freireich—early researchers and doctors of childhood leukemia at NCI.

Laszlo’s book is based on taped interviews of doctors and scientists whose work led to the cure of childhood leukemia. It is an essential primary source for anyone interested in oncology and its history, and is now available for free as a digital download on the Cancer History Project.

In 1937, Laszlo’s family fled Vienna as Jewish refugees. His mother, a psychiatrist who trained with Anna Freud, discovered she had breast cancer on the SS Île de France while the family journeyed to America. She died two years later.

His father, Daniel Laszlo, a physician who specialized in cardiovascular physiology, found a job in cancer research at Mount Sinai Hospital. He went on to study folate antagonists in mice—though folate antagonists hadn’t been characterized yet. The untested regimen was administered against his recommendation to none other than Babe Ruth.

Marcus Humphrey, who was diagnosed with two subtypes of lymphoma in 2021, and his wife Mary Humphrey speak with Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an oncologist at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Doroshow, who is also a historian of medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the Cancer History Project and is guest editor during National Cancer Survivor Month this June.

Humphrey sought treatment at Medical University of South Carolina Hollings Cancer Center for a swelling that had grown exponentially on the right side of his neck. Two regimens of chemotherapy failed. Marcus Humphrey’s oncologist later said it was the worst case of lymphoma he had ever seen.

Humphrey was almost out of options—and his heavy tumor burden made doctors wary of CAR T-cell therapy. They weighed the risks and went for it.

In this episode, 2023 David Karnofsky Memorial Award winner Hagop Kantarjian discusses his long career developing novel therapies for several types of leukemia.

“This is why I consider that choosing leukemia was the best decision in my life,” Kantarjian said to The Cancer Letter. “Because within the span of one professional lifetime, we were able to change the full course of all the leukemias from mostly incurable to mostly curable.”

Reviewing his extensive career in leukemia research, Kantarjian discusses the high cost of drug prices, and his optimism that the U.S. will overcome healthcare disparities, and the many lessons he learned from his mentor, Emil J Freireich.

“It's very important to continue to challenge the standards, the accepted standards, and to try to create new knowledge and innovate outside the general herd mentality that exists at any point in time,” Kantarjian said.

In this episode, Frederick Appelbaum, executive vice president, professor in the Clinical Research Division, and Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, speaks with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor with the Cancer History Project.

This episode features an interview with Sandra Hillburn, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2006, and Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an oncologist at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Doroshow, who is also a historian of medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the Cancer History Project.

When Hillburn was first diagnosed, she was given two to three months to live. Then, she sought treatment at Duke Cancer Institute, where she underwent surgery to remove the tumor. Afterward, she began receiving an experimental CMV vaccine treatment.

The treatment worked. Today, she continues to receive the vaccine once every six months.

This episode features a recording of a March 7 Women’s History Month panel on the topic of Betty Ford,  Nancy Reagan, and how their cancer diagnoses impacted a nation.

The panel was introduced by Monica Bertagnolli, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute, and moderated by Stacy Wentworth, MD, assistant professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Medical director of cancer survivorship at Atrium Wake Forest Baptist Health Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Bertagnolli and Wentworth were joined by Mirelle Luecke, MA, PhD, Supervisory museum curator of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, and Karen Tumulty, MBA, Deputy editorial page editor and columnist at The Washington Post.

In this conversation, Richard Silvera, assistant professor of infectious disease at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, speaks with Robert A. Winn, director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and guest editor of the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.

Silvera is a recipient of a grant from the Robert A. Winn Diversity in Clinical Trials Award Program, which was established in 2020 by the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation.

In this episode Silvera discusses his work caring for patients with anal cancer in the Bronx, and how doctors can gain the trust of underserved populations."

None of this work happens in isolation, but I don’t want to just be one researcher on an island by myself. I want to be part of a community of researchers doing this work," Silvera said.

Vickers: “We’ve been seen as exclusive and selected. I want to broaden that aperture for the organization.”

In this conversation, Selwyn Vickers, president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, speaks with Robert Winn, director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and guest editor of the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.

Vickers overviews his early career, how to tackle health disparities, and his plants for expanding access to MSK.

In this conversation, Robert Winn and Otis Brawley discuss the structural biases and racism that are present in law enforcement as well as in medicine after the killing of Tyre Nichols by police.

Otis Brawley is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University and co-editor of the Cancer History Project; and Robert Winn is director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and guest editor of the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.

In this episode, Brawley and Winn identify the racial and class power dynamics in American society, and why physicians and healthcare professionals have a responsibility to reflect on the problems in policing, and identify areas where these problems are also present in health care.

Brawley and Winn have had their own potentially deadly encounters with police—Brawley was thrown to the ground and held at gunpoint for standing in the garage of his own home; Winn was thrown to the ground and held at gunpoint for walking toward his own car.

Kay Dickersin, MA, PhD, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is one of the early leaders of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

In this interview, Dickersin discusses her breast cancer diagnosis at age 34, and her frustration that, at the time, most support groups seemed to focus on how to fix your makeup or your wig.

Dickersin, along with Marsha Oakley, a breast cancer survivor and nurse in Baltimore, decided to start their own advocacy group called Arm-in-Arm. This group addressed the difficult aspects of treatment and produced newsletters that were lighthearted in nature. Members of Arm-in-Arm called their jokes about their circumstances whistling past the graveyard.

Then, the group received an invitation from the Breast Cancer Coalition to attend the first meeting. From there, Dickersin became one of the group’s leaders, chairing NBCC’s research task force.

Dickersin was one of the architects of Project LEAD, NBCC’s initiative to educate advocates about the science of breast cancer. In this conversation she recounts Project LEAD’s beginnings and its impact.

Directors of the first three NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers are learning from the past, starting with the National Cancer Act, and mapping an equitable future for oncology.

On July 29, 2021, the Cancer History Project convened panelists Candace S. Johnson, president and CEO of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Craig B. Thompson, president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Peter WT Pisters, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center, for a two hour Zoom session moderated by co-editor Otis W. Brawley.

Craig Jordan was one of the first researchers to analyze and describe tamoxifen’s preventive properties. His discoveries changed the face of breast cancer prevention and treatment.

His career is storied. He received the Karnofsky award for his work as the father of tamoxifen, is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, met and corresponded with Princess Diana while he led the breast cancer program at the Robert H. Lurie Cancer Center, and served in the British military as captain of the Intelligence Service while undergoing his doctoral studies.

Jordan’s book “Tamoxifen Tales,” outlines the journey of discovery which led to the enormous contribution that antiestrogens, especially tamoxifen, have made to improve treatment as well as the prevention of breast cancer.

Robin Scheffler is an associate professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dwight Tosh had grown so weak that he was unable to walk. Still, doctors at the rural Arkansas hospital—where he lay in bed for weeks in 1962—were unable to diagnose him.

“My athletic body had been reduced to just a shell of an individual, looked like you’d just taken the skin and stretched it over my bones, just wasn’t much left of me,” Tosh, 73, a Republican state representative in Arkansas, said to Doroshow. “And still, the doctors couldn’t figure out or diagnose what the problem was.”

Tosh, only 13 at the time, wasn’t getting any better. He was running fevers of 107 and 108, and there didn’t seem to be a solution.

“And then a huge knot came up on my neck and a biopsy of that night revealed that I had Hodgkins’s lymphoma,” he said.

Doctors told his family he had two weeks left to live, but Tosh and his parents never quite believed that.

Tosh was the 17th patient admitted to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the first patient at St. Jude to become a 60 year survivor. He spoke with Dr. Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who is also a historian of medicine and a member of the Cancer History Project editorial board.

This is the second installment of the Cancer History Project’s series in honor of Cancer Survivors Month. Dr. Deborah Doroshow, Cancer History Project guest editor during the month of June, conducted the following interview with Beth Carner, a colon cancer patient who is now in remission.

At 25, Elizabeth Carner was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Thus began a months-long odyssey of six hour drives to Mayo Clinic, where Carner received chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

The treatments and cancer were painful and physically exhausting. At one point, she was given six weeks to live.

Then, a doctor at Mayo told Carner about a clinical trial she was a candidate for. When she arrived at the desk of Richard Goldberg, a GI oncologist, Carner was so weak she could barely hold her head up. Within 2 to 3 months of starting the drug, which would become known as Keytruda, or pembrolizumab, she could tell the drug was working.

After a year of being on the trial, doctors didn’t find any evidence of cancer. Carner remains in complete remission—eight years from when she was diagnosed.

This month, Cancer History Project guest editor Deborah Doroshow, MD, PhD is conducting several oral histories with people who have experienced cancer—in a preliminary attempt to begin to capture some of those experiences.

Although sources regarding the experiences of scientists and clinicians are often readily available, sources documenting the patient experience—a topic which historians of medicine like myself are deeply committed to elucidating—tend to be more difficult to find and are less frequently saved by archivists.

Doroshow’s first oral history is with Judy Orem, a participant on the phase I clinical trial of (Imatinib), or Gleevec.

While the story of Gleevec’s discovery and clinical testing is well known, Judy’s narrative provides a new perspective into the experience of being one of the first people to participate in a clinical trial of one of the earliest targeted therapies in hematology and oncology.

In a panel moderated by Dr. Narjust Duma, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, four directors of NCI-designated Cancer Centers discuss their unique perspectives as immigrants—and leaders in oncology. Topics cover their unique pathways to leadership, diversity in medicine, and challenges faced by international medical graduates.

The panel included Dr. Kunle Odunsi, director of University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center; Dr. Peter Pisters, president of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Dr. Leonidas Platanias, director of Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University; and Dr. Cornelia Ulrich, executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Jerome Yates became a cancer doctor during a time when medical oncologists were thought to be what he describes as “the garbage collectors of medicine.”

“The attitude among physician colleagues was, why are you wasting your time doing this? Not only are you wasting your time, but you’re making the patients sicker,” said Yates, 85, a retired oncologist who has practiced and administered research at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Vermont, NCI and the American Cancer Society.  “Some of them get very sick from the chemotherapy, because there are a lot of side effects with the normal tissues.” 

During his internship at San Bernardino County Hospital, Yates, then 29, encountered a metastatic testicular cancer patient around his age. The young man was admitted to the hospital with congestive heart failure. 

“They were going to let him die,” Yates said to The Cancer Letter. “I said, ‘If he came in and you didn’t know that he had metastatic cancer, you would treat him for his congestive heart failure.’ I convinced the attending. We treated him, and it bought him another four or five months. I thought it was an important four or five months.”  

The prevailing attitude toward cancer treatment was depressing—“That if somebody had metastatic disease, had cancer spread around the body, that they were going to die, and why would you want to prolong their agony?”

In 1965, Yates encountered an optimistic article, “​​Obstacles to the Control of Acute Leukemia” in the CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians, written by James Holland, an oncologist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Center.  

“He said that they were on the pathway to cure acute leukemia. The way it was structured, and the timing—I was taking care of some chronically ill patients—and it just sounded like it was exciting,” he said. 

Yates joined Holland at Roswell Park in 1968 and began conducting clinical trials with members of the cooperative group Acute Leukemia Group B cooperative group, the ALGB. This group, renamed the Cancer and Leukemia Group B in 1976, conducted clinical trials using two, three, or four-drug combinations. This strategy was not received kindly by the mainstream medical community. 

“There was a general attitude that we not only didn’t know what we were doing, but what we were doing was potentially harmful to many patients,” Yates said.  

Rather than embrace the work of the ALGB, cancer doctors largely adopted the thinking of William Dameshek, an influential hematologist at Harvard who was a mentor to many oncologists. 

“His attitude was that we were poison pushers, that we were cowboys, that we were doing things that weren’t in the best interest of the patient,” Yates said. “Because he was extremely influential, we were viewed as outliers.”

Still, Yates remained hopeful—“because, as a physician, taking care of these patients—it made you feel good.”

A band of “Cancer Cowboys” once known as the ALGB—Acute Leukemia Group B—are, in large part, responsible for flipping the mortality rate of childhood leukemia from 90% to 10%, where it stands today. 

While researching his book from 2013 to 2017, Tim Wendel, lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and author of "Cancer Crossings," spoke with the doctors of ALGB. Among them was longtime St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital CEO Donald Pinkel, who died March 9, Jerry Yates, Lucius Sinks, James and Jimmie Holland, Emil “Tom” Frei, and Emil J Freireich. Wendel’s brother Eric was a patient of Lucius Sinks at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, where Eric was treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia beginning when he was diagnosed in 1966, until he died in 1973.

In honor of Women’s History Month this March, this week’s podcast features an interview with Susan Love, founder and chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research.

In this discussion, Love overviews the breast cancer advocacy movement of the 1990s, and how she and others helped educate breast cancer advocates about the disease.

“Really this was, ‘we want to be at the table. We want to be making the suggestions and making sure they happen, not just marching around wearing pink,’ and I think that made a big difference,” Love said.

Dr. Edith P. Mitchell came a long way from growing up on a Tennessee farm, to becoming a brigadier general and serving on the President’s Cancer Panel.

“It was making a plan, having a plan, and all of us had similar type plans that we needed to leave the farm—yes I grew up on a farm—and get out of town,” Mitchell, member of the President’s Cancer Panel, clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology, director of the Center to Eliminate Cancer Disparities, and associate director of diversity affairs at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson University. “Yes, you have success, but look back, the students, students, the college students, the medical students, look back and pull somebody behind you, pull them up.”

Mitchell spoke with Dr. Robert Winn, director of VCU Massey Cancer Center and Dr. John Stewart, founding director of LSU Health/LCMC Health Cancer Center.

When Mitchell attended medical school at Virginia Commonwealth University, then called Medical College of Virginia, she was given a military scholarship and was supposed to give the Air Force two years of service.

She became interested in health policy and military medicine and remained in the Air Force. When thinking about retirement after 20 years of service, Mitchell, a colonel at the time, learned she was up for a promotion.

The only problem? Her competition, mainly white men, had all been to flight school.

“Most people go to flight school in their 20s, right? I was in my 40s with two teenage kids. So what did I do? I signed up for flight school. I finished. I got my flight wings and my certification in aerospace medicine,” Mitchell said. “Very few people know that I am certified in aerospace medicine, but what happened was, I was selected. I am the first woman doctor ever to be promoted to brigadier general in the history of the Air Force.”

This story is part of a series of interviews conducted by Robert Winn, guest editor of the Cancer History Project during Black History Month.

In today’s episode, Dr. Robert Winn, director of VCU Massey Cancer Center, and Dr. John Stewart, founding director of LSU Health/LCMC Health Cancer Center, speak with Dr. Harold Freeman, the father of patient navigation.

Harold Freeman had big plans after he finished his residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1968. He planned to cut cancer out of Harlem.

However, Freeman’s patients, Harlem residents who were poor and Black, often sought treatment too late. Freeman asked why—and aimed to fix this. This led to Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Breast Examination Center of Harlem, of which Freeman became the founding director. As president of the American Cancer Society in 1988, he published a study, "Cancer in the socioeconomically disadvantaged," exploring for the first time how poverty contributes to untreated cancers. All of this work, and his concerns about racial injustice, led to Freeman’s founding of patient navigation, an advance in helping people who face disparities address cancer.

This is a trailer episode for the Cancer History Project's new podcast, which will explore oral histories and interviews with the people who have shaped oncology as we know it.