Years ago, when the New York Times first started putting color pictures in its paper, I joked that people should not worry: The writing in the Gray Lady, I told them, would remain dry and lifeless.
I meant it with love, of course. There’s a time and place for hyperbole and exciting bold adjectives, and newspaper writing about serious subjects is not one of them. So perhaps it’s understandable the way that the Times described with due caution what might, eventually, be seen as cancer’s version of the Apollo missions. One took place on March 25, 2011. That day, the Food and Drug Administration approved for use in people with melanoma, that deadly skin cancer, the drug called Yervoy I mentioned a few pages earlier, made by Bristol-Myers.
An article ran in the Times in the business section, written by an encyclopedic colleague of mine, since retired, named Andrew Pollack. The story explained that Yervoy had been approved for use in metastatic melanoma, a major breakthrough. The article explained that 20 percent of people in the trial who took the drug lived two years or more. Yes, there were side effects, but not treating metastatic melanoma came with its own likely terminal side effect.
So for people dying of melanoma, Andrew’s article might just as well have read: WE CAN BRING YOU BACK FROM THE DEAD!
Looking back, too, there’s just no way to downplay the wording Andrew used to describe Yervoy: “a novel type of cancer drug that works by unleashing the body’s own immune system to fight tumors.”
This is where all the scientific study had been leading, from Metchnikoff and Ehrlich to Jacques Miller and Max Cooper, Peter Doherty, Tonegawa, and on and on. One discovery on top of another, one technique following the next, one painstaking failure leading to tiny breakthroughs, all on the backs of patients who willingly took their chances, let themselves be transplanted (begged for the treatment!) or tested with new medications, so that the immune system might not just be understood, but “unleashed.”
Science and market forces had collaborated to bring a seeming miracle cure to market. Just in time for Jason.