Cancer still not cured

“Judah is going to cure cancer in two years,” James Watson told Gina Kolata, a science and medicine reporter for The New York Times. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, was speaking about Judah Folkman, a medical researcher who had eradicated cancer in mice by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels, thereby starving the tumours. Kolata used the quote in a story on May 3, 1998.

She also mentioned several cautionary opinions. Folkman himself would go no further than to say, “If you have cancer and you are a mouse, we can take good care of you.”

“Gina Kolata’s story was accurate and contained all the right caveats,” writes Robert Cooke in Dr. Folkman’s War (Random House, 2001), a book about Folkman’s long research career.

“She had carefully repeated mouse, mouse, mouse throughout, and pointed out high in the story that many promising cancer treatments had produced remarkable results in animals but failed in humans,” Cooke, a Newsday science and medicine reporter, writes. Still, the story and its headline — “A Cautious Awe Greets Drugs that Eradicate Tumors in Mice” –prompted calls to Folkman for help, from all over the world.

“Some of the callers — pleading, crying — said they were flying to Boston right away,” Cooke writes. Some really did so, and had to be turned away.

Dashing false hopes is an awful thing to have to do, and the impact of Kolata’s story surprised and upset Folkman.

But it doesn’t surprise Brad Evenson, a National Post science and medicine reporter, who reported on the same subject.

“It’s something I’ve thought about a lot,” he says. “I spent a long time talking about how we have to get past ethical issues and medical trials: ‘This is all the stuff we have to do before we can even think about trying this stuff on patients.’ I was very careful but I’m sure it still filled people with false hope.”

He said the mere fact of publishing a story about a scientific or medical breakthrough can give a story deceptive significance. In Kolata’s case, the story ran in the first column of the front page of the Times. No wonder people got their hopes up.

“Cancer by its very nature has a cycle of raised hopes and dashed hopes,” says Evenson. “It’s always been that way.”

Cooke also reports on a subsequent story about Folkman by Ralph King, a Wall Street Journal science and medicine reporter on Nov. 12, 1998, with the headline “Novel cancer approach from noted scientist hits stumbling block.” This story reported on the difficulty other labs had in reproducing Folkman’s amazing mice-cancer cure and left the impression he might be something of a charlatan, overhyping his work to secure new research funds.

But the difficulties turned out to concern mundane issues such as damage to materials during transport. Such non-scientific obstacles say nothing about the validity of research, although they often cause laboratory results to remain unduplicated for years.

Medical successes and failures tend to be more nuanced than a news story can reflect. “That technique that Judah Folkman pioneered has cured some patients,” says Evenson. “They haven’t gone through the clinical trials, but they’ve cured patients.”

Caveat: The world is a long way from a cure for cancer. We should have hope, but that hope is for the future, not the present.

And if reporters sometimes feed that hope, then Evenson thinks that’s not such a bad thing.

“If you have cancer,” he says, “what else have you got except for hope?”