Early in 1998, New York Times science reporter and author Gina Kolata happened to be seated at a banquet next to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson. When Kolata asked Watson what was new in the world of science, he replied, "Judah Folkman and angiogenesis, that's what's new. Judah is going to cure cancer in two years." Folkman, a longtime physician and medical researcher at Harvard University and Children's Hospital, was caught off guard by the excited news reports that followed Watson's remark, but there was good reason for excitement. For nearly four decades, when not busy doing such things as inventing the heart pacemaker and attending to hundreds of patients, Folkman had been puzzling out a peculiarity of tumors: at some point during their formation, they sent forth chemical signals that in effect "recruited" blood vessels to feed them. If those signals could be intercepted through well-targeted drugs, Folkman reasoned, and the blood supply to cancerous formations thus interrupted, then the tumors themselves might be starved to death, or at least to dormancy.
In this book, Newsday writer Robert Cooke offers an accessible account of Folkman's work on angiogenesis, or the formation of blood vessels, which may well point the way to new treatments for cancer and related illnesses. Following Folkman's roundabout trail, one marked by considerable resistance on the part of doubtful colleagues, readers will gain a sense of how medical research is conducted--and, almost certainly, a sense of wonder at the medical breakthroughs that, as James Watson hinted, are just around the corner. --Gregory McNamee
From the Inside Flap
nty-eight-year-old Dr. Judah Folkman saw something while doing medical research in a United
States navy lab that gave him the first glimmering of a wild, inspired hunch. What if cancerous tumors, in order to expand, needed to trigger the growth of new blood vessels to feed themselves? And if that was true, what if a way could be found to stop that growth? Could cancers be starved to death? Dr. Folkman had ample reason to be self confident second in his class at Harvard Medical School, he was already considered one of the most promising doctors of his generation. But even he never guessed that his idea would eventually grow into a multibillion-dollar industry that is now racing through human trials with drugs that show unparalleled promise of being able to control cancer, as well as other deadly diseases.
For the creation of this book, Dr. Judah Folkman cooperated fully and exclusively with acclaimed science writer Robert Cooke. He granted Cooke unlimited interviews,
From the Back Cover
"Judah Folkman's answer-stop cancers by cutting off their blood supplies-has much too long been thought of as too simple to ever work. Now, however, a broad set of antiangiogenic agents based on Judah's ideas are coming on line. The verdict 'cancer' need no longer be synonymous with fear and despair. Our country's 'war against cancer' at last has found its general."
—JAMES D. WATSON, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of The Double Helix
"It is said that genius disdains the beaten path, and that's certainly true of Dr. Judah Folkman. He has suffered for it, but his imagination, his persistence-and yes, his glorious obsession-will benefit us all. We owe him our boundless gratitude."
-JONATHAN HARR, author of A Civil Action
"Rarely in the history of modem biomedical research has a major advance been attributable directly to the energies and vision of a single individual. This is such a story, about one man's vision, drive, indeed obsession with an idea that will one day dramatically change cancer therapy."
-ROBERT A. WEINBERG, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT, author of One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins and Racing to the Beginning of the Road: The Search for the Origin of Cancer
"I first encountered Judah Folkman when I was a surgical intern at Boston City Hospital. His already legendary crisp intellect provided a logical scaffold for my understanding of complex diseases. Judah, full of warmth and humanity, inspired me and generations of young doctors and scientists to pursue careers in his image. Dr Folkman's War does a masterly job of describing his gentle and determined magic. We are fortunate that Mr. Cooke has so meticulously, engagingly, and honestly captured Judah's story. It will serve as a powerful beacon for all who tenaciously pursue the understanding and treatment of human disease."
-WARREN M. ZAPOL, Reginald Jenney Professor of Anaesthesia, Harvard Medical School, and anesthetist-in-chief, Massachusetts General Hospital
"Sadly, my first meeting with Dr. Judah Folkman may have and most likely did come too late. We met as I searched desperately for a medical solution to the critical illness of my wife, Winnie, but by then her cancer had advanced beyond salvation. Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed by what I learned of Dr. Folkman's pioneering work in the cancer research field and his personal commitment and that of his close associates to success in this vital effort."
-ARNOLD PALMER
"Robert Cooke is without a doubt the most scrupulous and judicious science writer I have ever known. His strong passion for accuracy and fair play sings from every page of Dr Folkman's War, taking the battle against cancer beyond sensationalism to a place that is at once informative and exciting. Because the book is grounded, as such journalism should be, on solid science, hope sounds from it all the more loudly."
-LAURIE GARRETT, author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
About the Author
ROBERT COOKE, a native of Southern California, served four years in the coast guard before graduating from California State Polytechnic College and receiving a master's degree from UCLA a year later. Since then he has spent thirty-five years covering science and medicine for major newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Atlantic journal and Constitution, and Newsday. His fascination with science news began with the advent of the space age and matured with continuing exposure to the biological sciences. His interests are wide-ranging and include molecular biology, genetics, geology, astronomy, and archaeology and anthropology.
Cooke has been with Newsday for fifteen years. He is married to the former Sue Bailey Cato, whom he met just before he entered high school, and they have three grown children-Gregory, Karen, and Emily. He lives in Huntington, Long Island, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
IT WAS A TANTALIZING idea that Judah Folkman had nurtured for nearly four decades—he had hatched it, worked it, published it, defended it, romanced it. He had withstood the ridicule of his peers. He had fought battles of medical and scientific politics. And he had endured, seemingly obsessed, never straying from the ideas in his head, the conviction in his heart, and the truth he saw in his laboratory. That was where the real battles were waged, where Folkman had been trying for nearly forty years to read and understand Nature's book, page by page. Now the time had come to see what it all amounted to. The answers were starting to trickle in from medical wards around the country, and there was little more for Folkman to do than wait, and hope.
At the core was a simple notion that had gradually matured in Folkman's mind ever since that day in 1961 when he was noodling in a navy lab in Bethesda, Maryland, a twenty-eight-year-old draftee trying to make cells grow under artificial conditions. That was when he'd first noticed a strange thing about tumors: They wouldn't grow unless they first recruited their own blood vessels. Over time he convinced himself that there had to be some way to block the growth of those blood vessels. To starve the tumor to death-and save the patient.
So Folkman had been trying to conquer cancer for nearly four decades when, in the waning days of the twentieth century, the first patients began to be infused with the natural drugs that had come from his long campaign. The new compounds had worked marvelously in mice-"We've never lost a Mouse yet," Folkman liked to say-and now they were being given the first crucial tests in men and women. Three clinical trials were under way to test one of the potent substances, endostatin, that had been discovered in Folkman's laboratory. And as many as two hundred biotechnology companies, some large and others tiny, were exploring the once-ridiculed field that Folkman had years before named "angiogenesis," meaning the growth of the blood vessels de novo needed to support tumor growth.
In Boston, where Folkman had lived, studied, and worked since leaving Ohio behind in 1953, the volunteers trooped to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for their daily infusions of the possible wonder drug. The infusion center was on the ground floor, equipped with a collection of beds, some of which were fashioned after chairs, designed for patients who could take their medicine sitting up. Each would take his or her place, and the dose would then be thawed. Endostatin was a precious commodity that couldn't be wasted-the first one-kilogram batch was said to be worth seven million dollars-so it was never thawed before the patient actually arrived, in case the patient didn't show up. But they always did. These were people facing terminal cancer, desperate for the cure and very relieved to find that this drug, unlike the standard chemotherapy they had received, did not make them awfully sick. Of course, they hoped the treatments would also be different in a much more important way: Chemotherapy had not worked. That's why they were here. The infusion process, during which the drug was given through an IV line, lasted twenty minutes. Then the patients would leave, returning the same time the next day, Saturdays and Sundays included.
Would the new treatment live up to its billing, actually erase tumors without dangerous side effects? Would patients who had been given little or no chance of survival emerge unscathed, as if touched by magic? No one could tell-but everyone was watching. Although the first phase of the trials was only meant to test for signs of toxicity, those involved could not resist the natural impulse to peek beyond the government-enforced protocols, hoping for signs, even the barest hint, of efficacy. The doctors running the trials, gagged by their institutions, refused to utter a public word. But the rumors were flying. The doctors talked sub rosa, and so did the nurses and interns who were close to the trials. Word got around the biomedical grapevine that at DanaFarber and both of the other experiment centers conducting the trials in Texas and Wisconsin some patients' tumors had stopped growing. One man, it was said, had experienced remarkable progress. As one insider put it, the mystery man's cancer, both the primary tumor and its dangerous metastases, had been "galloping." But since he began getting endostatin-in only small doses during the toxicity phase of the trial-his tumors had shrunk by half One patient was just one patient, but it was an encouraging
