The Secret History of the War on Cancer

548 Pages·2007·5.644 MB·English

by  Devra Davis

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the
secret
history
of the
war on
cancer
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also by devra davis
When Smoke Ran LikeWater:
Tales of Environmental Deception and
the Battle Against Pollution
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t he
s ec r e t
h i s tory
of the
war on
c anc e r
Devra Davis
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
new york
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Copyright © 2007 by Devra Davis
Hardcover edition published in 2007 by Basic Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback edition first published in 2009 by Basic Books
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information,
address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases
in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more
information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books
Group, 2300 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call [phone],
ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
design by jane raese
Text set in 13-point Perpetua
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-465-01566-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-465-01568-9
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
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For Richard
Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?”
Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?”
AndVanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?”
But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?”
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,
but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
—martin luther king, jr.
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Contents
Preface ix
1 The Secret History 3
2 Natural and Other Experiments 17
3 A Broad Enough Principle 45
4 Phantom Collaborators 73
5 Fear Sells 107
6 Making Goods out of Bads 141
7 Saving Cigarettes 169
8 The Good War 199
9 Cancer Doctoring 223
10 Deconstructing Cancer Statistics 245
11 Doctoring Evidence 267
12 The Harshest of Schoolmasters 297
13 No Safe Place 329
14 Chasing Tales 363
15 Presumed Innocent 391
Epilogue Mother’s Last 437
Afterword: Bad Dreams 455
Notes 479
Acknowledgments 503
Index 513
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Preface
Writing has to do with darkness, and a desire, perhaps a
compulsion, to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and
bring something back out to the light.1
—margaret atwood
My mother always said that G-d watches over little children be-
cause parents can’t be everywhere all the time. I come from a long line
of well-watched children. When she was five, my great-grandmother
Molly once spent an entire day hiding under a stack of hay on a horse-
drawn cart until her mother could whisk her away from pogroms in
Transcarpathia. Molly grew up to be a very patient woman.
Sometimes survival traits that work in desperate circumstances can
lead to problems in other environments. As a boy of nine during the
First World War, Molly’s son, my great-uncle Paul, roamed through
the woods of Hungary, eating as much as he could whenever he
could. About the ability to binge, he once said, “By the time the fat
ones were thin, the thin ones were dead.”2This could explain why
Central European peasants who survive famine tend to be stout but
able to run like hell.
It was a good thing for me that Molly’s daughter, my grandmother,
Bubbe Fanne, came from that stock. In the winter of 1924, a fiery ex-
plosion rocked the basement dry-cleaning factory below my grandpar-
ents’ small wooden home in Monongahela. Bubbe Fanne raced
through the flames to grab her two toddlers, one of whom, Harry,
would become my dad less than twenty years later. Only years after
she died did I learn how Bubbe Fanne got the thick red scars that ran
down her arms and across her shoulders and chest. Long after his
mother had pulled him from a blazing building, my father eluded death
another time. As a drill sergeant, he snatched a live grenade from the