Setting the Body’s ‘Serial Killers’ Loose on Cancer
BETHESDA, Md. The teenage surgeon was mystified. A fist-size tumor had been removed from the front of his patient 12 years earlier, but his doctors had not been practiced to scuff out many smaller growths in his liver. The cancer should have killed him, still here he lay almost the table for a routine gallbladder operation.
The surgeon, Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, examined the mans abdominal cavity, sifting his liver in his fingers, feeling for hard, dense tumors but he could locate no mention of cancer.
It was 1968. Dr. Rosenberg had a hunch he had just witnessed an astonishing fighting in which a cooperatives immune system had vanquished cancer. Hoping there was an elixir in the mans blood, Dr. Rosenberg got right to use to transfuse some of it into a helpful dying of stomach cancer. The effort failed. But it was the begin of a lifelong quest.
Something began to burn in me, he would write fused, something that has never at the to the front out.
Half a century in the center of, Dr. Rosenberg, who turns 76 vis--vis Tuesday and is chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute here, is part of a tiny fraternity of researchers who have doggedly pursued a direction turbocharging the bodys immune system as a outcome that more cancer patients can experience recoveries advance his long-ago patients.
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