3 In the 1950s, people were terrified of cancer and did not want to talk about let alone face them. The New York Times refused to print the word “cancer” or “breast” for advertisement of cancer support-group. People have been terrified of cancer even though heart disease kills more people than cancer. In 1958, Science Digest reported that there were 450,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed each year and seven hundred thousand cases of cancer were being treated in America. In 1958, according to Patterns of Disease, one woman in four under the age of thirty-five could expect to get cancer, and one in seven would die from it; one man in five under the age of fifty would be afflicted, and one in eight would die. People tend to connect cancer to death immediately because cancers come out again and again after the doctors treated them. It is like the dead people come out again from the grave and eat people’s lives. I think that people’s feeling towards cancer and zombies are same. In 1950s, many doctors believed that cancer was not curable. Now people started to believe that cancer is curable. However, cancer’s nature of proliferation and invasion of nearby tissue in the body still scares people. Today, doctors and scientists believe that cancer is a genetic disease. For instance BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes cause breast cancer. In the future, people go to the oncologist’s clinic to check cancer genome for early prevention of these dreadful diseases.
4 Sidney Farber used anti-folate for leukemia treatment in 1947. Dr. Faber utilized folate analogues, which are chemical compounds that should reduce the growth of leukemia cells, and he tested his anti-folates on leukemia patients. It was a new treatment and first used by Sidney Farber to treat acute childhood leukemia. This finding encouraged other researchers to discover drugs that blocked different functions involved in cell growth and replication. This is the era of chemotherapy history. Siddhartha Mukherjee explains, “cancer as not one but many diseases.”
Sidney Farber devoted his life to save his cancer patients. He predicted that folic acid antagonists would inhibit or stop the proliferation of cancer cells. His research was used to find other chemotherapeutic agents. Under his influence and leadership, he founded the “Jimmy Fund”, which was one of the first comprehensive pediatric oncology treatment center, and the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation. Later this foundation became the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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Min Chiu Li was accused of using his patients for his experiments. He was not an American, but Chinese. So he was called an outsider. I feel that there are some cultural differences between Chinese and American. American people tend to put value about people’s feelings. Chiu Li had been studying cancer, therefore he knew the nature of recurrent cancer and he could recognize the sign of life for them. He cared about numbers and obsessed over the number “0” in order to reach an hcg level of 0. Therefore, he continued to treat chemotherapy drugs long after the patient looked well. It looked cold and heartless to care more about numbers for some doctors. I understand them because chemotherapy is horrible toxins to the body. Min Chiu Li lost his job for that, but he turned out to be right. Any trace of cancer was detected by indicators such as hcg level, where cancer relapsed some months later. What is worse, this relapse becomes more resistant to chemotherapy. When I had herpies because of stress, some American people believes that HIV causes these diseases. In Japan, it is very common in hihgly stressed people. I had to do many tests to prove that I did not have HIV. When I took medication, one doctor told me that if I took excess of drugs, I didn’t have any side-effects of disease like headache. I did not want to have a headache, so I took excess of medicines to fight back to this virus even through this doctor was reluctant to give me excess medications because of ethical issues. As a result, I am headache free my entire my life. So many people complain headache after this disease. Sometimes we need to take a risk to fight back against diseases. It is very difficult to deal with human bodies because we have exceptionally complicated bodies.
