Malignant Metaphor by Alanna Mitchell

Author:Alanna Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2017-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Toxic Prayer

Vitamin C therapy brings to mind the history of those other chemical assaults on cancer cells, known as chemotherapy. The very idea that drugs could halt the growth of malignant tumors, or push back the advance of the few cancerous cells roaming the body, or cure cancer, was considered ludicrous by most people until the 1960s or 1970s. Until then, the treatments for cancer were surgery and maybe radiation. The field of medical oncology, which is the subspecialty of internal medicine devoted to using chemotherapy on cancer, did not even officially exist until 1973.

Yale University’s Vincent DeVita, one of the giants of oncology and the former director of the U.S.’s National Cancer Institute, writes in the journal Cancer Research that in the 1960s, it took “plain old courage to be a chemotherapist.” Some who tried to experiment with the drugs at that time were referred to openly as the “lunatic fringe.” This was highly experimental, unpopular stuff. And like the remedies of the ancients — trying to readjust the humors by fiddling with the liquid elements of the body — it took a vibrant imagination.

You can see why it was frowned upon. The idea of chemotherapy came from the use of chemical weapons in war. DeVita reports that the original team of cancer drug researchers at New York’s Sloan-Kettering moved there lock, stock and barrel from the U.S. government’s Chemical Warfare Service after the Second World War. The first chemo drug was related to mustard gas. Doctors treating soldiers who had been gassed noticed that they died because their lymph nodes and bone marrow were terribly damaged. So early chemotherapists tried using derivatives of mustard gas in smaller amounts to kill off cancer cells in bone marrow as a way to treat cancer of the lymph system. The results seemed promising through the mid-1940s, but the remissions were “brief and incomplete,” DeVita reports. But the early research led to a suite of similar drugs developed in the 1950s, some of which are still in use to treat some blood and lymph cancers.

By the early 1960s, researchers had begun looking to the plant world for treatments. One of the early successes was from the tiny Madagascar periwinkle, whose derivatives successfully treated leukemia (a blood cancer) and Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a cancer of the lymph system). Since then, scientists have been scouring the world for plant remedies, including those used in traditional medicine. That’s been dubbed “bioprospecting” or “biopiracy” and has led to criticism from indigenous peoples and farmers that heavily financed drug companies swoop in, find cures in the wild and make their billions without compensating those who found the natural drugs in the first place.

I remember being with an international cadre of bioprospecting scientists a decade ago, deep in the jungle of Suriname, once known as Dutch Guiana, in South America. They were on a collecting trip, following their hosts from the Trio tribe through the wilderness, trying to see in the plants what the healers of that ancient people saw.

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