The doc's progress

On successive weeks the public learned that a medical insight has suggested a way to go to--kill cancer; and that a second (and unrelated) study suggests that we are no closer than ever to devising the means to stop a cold. The cancer story, the story of a quiet, mythogenic research doctor who has been plugging away at his notion that cancer can't extrude its poisons unless it is fed, made huge headlines and is featured in both Time and Newsweek, as well it should be. Over 500,000 Americans die every year from cancer. Moreover, its ugly face putrefies life, attacking the very young and bringing agony to the very old. It did not surprise that when Moses Judah Folkman's thirty-year-long efforts to devise the means to deny tumors the nourishment of blood hit the front page of the New York Times, the reaction was tumultuous. On the stock market, the experimenting company (EntreMed) rose in price by 700 per cent, settling down to 400 per cent. And what seemed like every cancer sufferer in America put in for the two drugs developed by Dr. Folkman and his laboratory. But of course it isn't yet known whether they will actually do for human beings what they so beneficently do for mice.

The cold news is really very bad news. Jane Brody of the New York Times advises us that the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh and the Health Sciences Center at the University of Virginia recruited 276 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 55. They were given physical, social, and psychological examinations; then they were placed in quarantine, and cold viruses were deposited in their nasal passages. On each of five successive days they were examined. Who became infected, and who developed symptoms of a cold? The heroes in question were paid $800 to go through this procedure, which sum should surely be the minimum wage for anyone letting a cold be induced.

The tests didn't give us any news one could classify as welcome. It transpires that stress is a very big factor in catching colds. Stress is caused by the obvious things (getting fired, going broke, being cuckolded) but also by unsuspected things, e.g., isolation. If you are socially active, with your family, with friends, with business associates, your level of stress is low, and that equanimity does what?

It tends--we learn--to make you resistant to cold viruses. If you are sad and lonely you won't for that reason necessarily catch a cold. But if a cold bug is floating around, it is likelier to victimize you than if you were vibrant and mixing it up with friends and family.

There are those (I'm one) who suffer most grievously from common colds. I have predicted that when I die, the cause of death will be a common cold. But the logic here must be carefully traced. If A then B does not mean if not B then not A. A friend who is a renowned doctor got a cold so incapacitating last January as to keep him home for 23 days, unprecedented in his experience. The doctor, treating a dozen patients every day, is exposed to myriad cold germs, but the same would be true of subway riders and airplane passengers. It is manifestly incorrect to assume that sudden social despondency aggravated his condition; so that we learn from random experiences nothing more than that you can be intensely social, and still get floored by the common cold.

The search for cures is healthy, even if a philosophical turn of mind is forced upon us ever since Ponce de Leon came back from Florida in the sixteenth century without the vial of water that would give him eternal youth. Death is a sullen absolute; but there are people alive who would be dead except for these medical discoveries. It is instructive, at inquisitive gatherings of family and friends, to ask around: How many would be dead but for the medicines discovered in the past fifty-odd years? A statistic on the matter isn't readily come by, so that one's feel for it is impressionistic. Is it safe to say that 20 per cent of Americans are alive who otherwise would not be?

The lure of medical discovery is a potent drug and Dr. Folkman is the embodiment of the scientific hero. He goes to great lengths to fight off publicity. He gives credit to his colleagues in any conceivable situation. He has endured the aggressive contempt of many contemporaries during his long struggle. He is separated by googols from the 276 cold-detection volunteers, but shares a muse with them. How heavily we depend upon, and how insufficiently we venerate, these pioneers.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning