- Seizing the moment: Introduction | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s and the future
1940s
Whether tending to young patients (above) or collaborating in the lab (below), Sidney Farber – dubbed "the father of modern chemotherapy" – was determined to improve survival rates for children with cancer.
The perilous limits of mid-century medical science stared at Sidney Farber, MD, every time he examined a child's leukemia cells under his microscope at Children's Hospital Boston. Virtually without exception, every young leukemia patient died within weeks of diagnosis, while doctors could offer nothing but a brief course of cortisone therapy to relieve symptoms.
Even to a pathologist trained to view cell and tissue samples dispassionately – as a basis for making a diagnosis and prescribing treatment – it was impossible not to be affected by the human consequences of an incurable childhood illness. The existence of so many "hopeless" cases was intolerable to Farber, and he set out to do what the medical wisdom of the time held to be impossible: develop a drug therapy for cancer.
Doing so meant stepping beyond the classic, laboratory-bound role of pathologists and leading a clinical study in patients. It had long been known that leukemia arises when immature white blood cells called blasts begin to fill the bone marrow, crowding out normal white cells and weakening the body's ability to fight disease. Farber knew that folic acid, an essential vitamin, stimulates the growth and maturation of bone marrow. He reasoned that a drug able to block folic acid could shut down the production of abnormal marrow associated with leukemia. It so happened that the drug manufacturer Lederle was testing such a drug, aminopterin.
The existence of so many "hopeless" cases was intolerable to Farber, and he set out to develop a drug therapy for cancer.
In November 1947, Farber and colleague Louis Diamond, MD, gave the drug to 16 children who were seriously ill with leukemia. Ten of them went into remission – the first time that a drug tested as an anticancer agent had proved effective against the disease. Though the remissions would prove brief, and though Farber's work initially met with more skepticism than celebration, the age of cancer chemotherapy had arrived. With it, Sidney Farber, supported by Children's and the Variety Club of New England, established the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, now known as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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