Jan 24, 2020
Dr. Hayes interviews Dr. DeVita about his role as Director of NCI and his time with CHOP and MOPP.
Dr. Daniel F. Hayes is the Stuart B. Padnos Professor of Breast Cancer Research at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. Dr. Hayes’ research interests are in the field of experimental therapeutics and cancer biomarkers, especially in breast cancer. He has served as chair of the SWOG Breast Cancer Translational Medicine Committee, and he was an inaugural member and chaired the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Tumor Marker Guidelines Committee. Dr. Hayes served on the ASCO Board of Directors, and served a 3 year term as President of ASCO from 2016-2018.
TRANSCRIPT
[MUSIC PLAYING] The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories, The Art of Oncology,
brought to you by the ASCO Podcast Network, a collection of nine
programs covering a range of educational and scientific content and
offering enriching insight into the role of cancer care. You can
find all of the shows, including this one, at podcast.asco.org.
Welcome to Cancer Stories. I'm Dr. Daniel Hayes. I'm a medical
oncologist and a translational researcher at the University of
Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. And I'm the past president of ASCO.
I'm really privileged to be your host for a series of podcast
interviews with the founders of our field.
In this series of podcasts, I hope to bring appreciation of the
courage and the vision and most importantly the scientific
background among the leaders who founded our field of clinical
cancer care over the last 70 years. I hope by understanding the
background of how we got to what we now considered normal in
oncology, we can all work together towards a better future for our
patients and their families during and after cancer treatment.
Today, my guest on this podcast is Dr. Vincent T. DeVita, best
known as Vince. Dr. DeVita is generally considered one of the
so-called Gang of Five, including Doctors Canellos, Young, Chabner,
and Schein, who I've been trying to get on for this podcast in the
future, all at the NCI, and who brought many of the concepts we now
accept as standard into the clinic in the 1960s and '70s.
Dr. DeVita is currently a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
and Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine. I think it's also
fair to say, Dr. DeVita was instrumental in the passage of the 1971
National Cancer Act. And I want to hear more about that as we get
into this.
He was director of the NCI and the National Cancer Program from
1980 to 1988 and then moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Center as Physician in Chief and subsequently became the Director
of the Yale Cancer Center in 1993. Among his many honors-- and I
don't have time to go through them all-- but he has served as
President of the American Cancer Society. And I think most dear to
me, he was President of ASCO in 1977 and 1978. Dr. DeVita, welcome
to our program.
Nice to be here, Dan.
I've done a little background. I know you grew up in the Bronx. And
I know you went to William and Mary for undergrad and George
Washington Medical School. And I also read what I didn't know,
which is that you did your internship and residency at the
University of Michigan.
We're recording this just before the NCAA basketball tourney. And I
have to say, go blue. We're all excited here in Ann Arbor about our
basketball team.
[LAUGHTER]
What I'm really interested in is, were your parents physicians? Or
what made you choose medicine out of the Bronx?
Well, no, my father was a banker. And my mother was an interior
decorator. So it was kind of a funny mix.
But I think it's kind of peculiar. I was growing up, and my
mother-- I tell this story in my book. My mother was kind of
frightened by the fact that I really, as a seven- or eight-year-old
kid, really thought the guy who delivered the ice-- in those days,
we had ice boxes-- was terrific. And I wanted to be like Nunzi the
iceman.
And she panicked and said, no, no. You're going to be a doctor. And
every time someone asked me what I was going to be, I just said I
was going to be a doctor. And when I went to school, I decided I'd
be a doctor. It was sort of Mama driving me in that direction.
So you had a choice of being an iceman or a doctor [LAUGHS].
Right. I like-- I mean, biology was always a favorite subject of
mine. So it was a good fit.
And tell me about how you ended up going to the NIH and choosing
oncology. Was that serendipitous? I talked to Bob Young the other
day. And he said, fundamentally, he hadn't planned to be an
oncologist and got to the NIH and liked it. Was that your role, or
did you know you wanted to do cancer from the start?
No, I was going to be a cardiologist. In fact, when I was a
first-year resident, I did cardiac catheterizations and was a
co-author on a paper that for a long time was well-cited in the
field. So I applied to both the Heart and Lung Institute and the
Cancer Institute.
And those are very competitive positions. And I had an interview
with Robert Berliner, which didn't go well [LAUGHS]. So I didn't
get invited to the Heart Institute. And I went to the Cancer
Institute.
And when I walked in, Dr. David Rall was the chief of the
pharmacology branch. And I asked him if I could work on the
pharmacology of digoxin. And he, wise person that he was, said,
sure. Go ahead if that's what you want to do.
And I was surrounded by people who were working on anti-cancer
drugs. And I actually became fascinated with them. And it was only
a few months, because I was also on the wards at the time, that I
said, oncology is the way to go. It was an exciting new field. It
was kind of a funny field in those days. But I found it exciting,
so I switched.
So just to give you a plug here, I think many of us know that you
wrote a book, The Death of Cancer, published a couple of years ago,
co-written with your daughter Elizabeth by the way. But in it, you
described a number of things. And one of those that I loved were
your stories about Gordon Zubrod.
And I trained with Dr. Frei at the Dana-Farber. He always had great
things to say about Dr. Zubrod. And I wonder if you could tell the
folks listening in who he was-- I think most people don't even know
that-- and the impact he had on our field.
Yeah, I used to call him the great umbrella. The field was very
controversial at the time. And so the people who were doing things
like saying, I'm going to try to cure this cancer-- leukemia in
Frei's case and Hodgkin's in our case-- were considered just a
little bit this side of insane. He was somebody who was
distinguished.
Now, Frei had-- Zubrod had been at St. Louis as a professor and
also at Johns Hopkins. And he was a very distinguished-looking man
and a very polite, careful man. And so he used to provide sort of
the umbrella for all of us, so that [INAUDIBLE] he'd take the heat.
And we could go on and do our work.
So he was-- he did enormous number of things. I mean, the whole
clinical trial structure was established by Gordon Zubrod. The
phase I, II, III trials was all done in a paper by Gordon Zubrod in
the late 1950s. So I think he was just a guy who had foresight and
was a great leader.
I ultimately took his job. He got tired of bucking the bureaucracy
and retired and went to Florida as the director of their cancer
center there. So I got to know him pretty well. And like Frei, I
have great admiration with him.
I mean, it's interesting how we take phase I, II, and III for
granted. And when he came in, and not too long before you came in,
those things weren't-- nobody really knew how to do this stuff.
Doctors Frei and Freireich were already at the NCI when you got
there, correct?
Yes, indeed. Yeah, they were.
Yeah.
And so they must have been inspirational.
They were, and especially Freireich. Freireich was always on the
wards. And Tom didn't come over to the wards very much. He was sort
of the direct-- he was chief of medicine. And Freireich was the
chief of the leukemia service. So we saw Freireich all the time.
Tom came over once in a while.
And Jay was a super doctor. And it was very hard to stay ahead of
him. You'd get an x-ray on a patient. And he'd call you up 20
minutes later and tell you what it was. He was already down looking
at it. So you had to stay on your toes with Jay.
And of course he was, as everybody knows-- Jay-- he was a bold guy,
who-- I mean, he looked like he could walk through a wall. So he
frightened a lot of people. But he was an inspiration. So I'm
always grateful for what Jay Freireich taught me.
There's a great story in your book, that Dr. Frei has told me as
well, about the first platelet transfusion at the NCI. Can you
elaborate on that? I think most folks don't know about that
story.
Platelet transfusion was, again, one of those radical departures.
But Freireich reasoned that we were losing more people from
bleeding than we were from leukemia. So he worked out a way of
plasma pheresing people and collecting platelets. And we didn't
have a lot of the expertise we have now.
And they came in quart bags. I mean, they were plasma bags that
were huge. And we were treating little kids. So they were--
throwing them into heart failure was a problem. So it was pretty
radical. And he was told to stop doing it by the clinical director
at that time.
And in fact, he was told that if he didn't stop doing it, he was
going to be fired. And he told me-- he said, I went back to my
office, sat down, and thought about it. And I decided I didn't want
to work at a place where I couldn't do that. So I just kept on
doing it. And the person who said he was going to fire him never
did. But that was Jay Freireich.
[LAUGHS]
He believed so strongly in it. And when I went to Yale right after
I left the Cancer Institute-- I finished my residency up there. And
I told them-- when I saw leukemia patients who were bleeding-- and
I said, what you should do is platelet transfusions. And they said,
they don't work.
And I said, I used them. And I saw them work. So I think we're
losing patients unnecessarily. It was just very controversial. So
eventually I left the program.
I was going to take a residency and then a fellowship in hematology
there. And I decided to go back to the Cancer Institute where these
adventurous things were going on. Times are different now, of
course.
Dr. Frei once told me a story that he-- you may have been with
him-- that he was making rounds in the clinical center. And in
those days, apparently, the adults and the kids were in the same
ward. And there was a child with essentially no white cells, who'd
been induced for leukemia, and a man next to him with CML.
And so-- and actually, when Dr. Frei told me this, I kind of said,
I don't think I want to hear this story, because he said, well, you
know, the kid didn't have any white cells. And the guy next to him
had way too many white cells. So [LAUGHS] I said, tell me you
didn't do this.
He said, yeah, we took platelets out from the guy and gave them to
the kid. And the kid got better for a while. It was really
exciting. I thought, boy, you don't see that anymore.
Yeah, I mean, it was a very reasonable thing to do, because the
white cells in a chronic myelogenous leukemia patient work very
well in terms of fighting infection.
Yeah.
So there was no reason. And the kids, otherwise, wouldn't survive.
And so, yeah, I was there when we got these-- we gave these. I
mean, they weren't easy to give, because they stuck in the lungs.
And we didn't have HLA matching at the time. So they were-- a lot
of them were mismatched.
But for a while, they were effective. And then we went to
collecting white cells from normal people. But the white cells had
not worked as well as platelets had worked.
Platelets have been a lifesaver. Now it's a couple of hundred
million dollar business each year now. So it's routinely done, as
many things that Jay started are routinely done now.
Of the many things for which you are credited, I think it's the use
of combination chemotherapy for Hodgkin's and then subsequently
non-Hodgkin's that is one of your lasting legacies. There must have
been a lot of drama around doing that. I mean, I think we all just
assume you're going to start protocol. You write the protocol. You
get funding for it. And you go forward.
But can you give us some stories about sitting around at night and
thinking about how to do this? Or how did you choose those drugs
and why and how to give them and the obstacles that were
involved?
Yeah, actually, it was a very complicated process. And we didn't
have the information we have now. What we had was-- I was doing
this with Jack Moxley, who left active medicine and became a dean
after he left the Cancer Institute. But we're still in touch.
And Jack was working with [? Sy ?] [? Perry ?] using the new
isotope, tritiated thymidine, looking at the bone marrow of CML
patients and also of mice. And I was doing the same thing with the
leukemia 1210, which was a model that we used for chemotherapy all
the time. And what we were trying to do was figure out the kinetics
of human versus mouse marrow, so we could develop schedules that
humans would survive.
We quickly found out that you can't use the mouse as a model,
because their blood cells went through a kinetic phase about half
the length of humans. So you had to schedule in a different way. So
we worked that out.
And then we looked at very simple-- something that people really
ignored is that when you give a chemotherapy agent that is toxic to
the marrow, you don't get abnormal blood counts right away. For a
week, you'll have a normal white cell. And then on day seven or
eight, it begins to fall, because the storage compartment in the
marrow works well for about a week. And then there's no
replenishment. And the white count falls.
So between the two, looking at the marrow and looking at the white
cells in the periphery, we came up with a schedule for MOPP. And
then the other things were simple. We just decided that you'd have
to have three or four drugs that worked by themselves.
There had been people doing combination chemotherapy before-- Tom
Hall in Boston and [? Alan ?] [INAUDIBLE] at Yale. And their
rationale was they're looking at a sequential biochemical blockade.
But they ignored whether the drugs actually worked against the
tumor, assuming that if you gave them together, that the
biochemical blockade would dominate.
And it didn't work. In fact, it was very discouraging. But we
decided the way to do it was take drugs that had some activity in
the disease and use them together and use them in full doses in the
schedules that we worked out because of the prior work I was
telling you about. So it took a while to put that together.
And then Jack Moxley and I used to do this at a bar in Georgetown
called the Lehigh Grill, where we used to-- my cardiology desire--
I used to go to Georgetown where there was a wonderful cardiologist
Proctor Harvey, who used to hold Thursday night sessions. You had
an auditorium that was wired. So you could hear heart sounds. And
after that, we'd go to the Lehigh Grill. And we sort of put
together the protocol.
When we presented it to Tom, he thought it was a good idea. But the
other people around him thought it was insane and really tried to
stop it.
Tom Frei?
Yeah.
Tom Frei, yeah, yeah.
Well, Tom was supportive. Yeah, Emil Frei was his real name. But
everybody called him Tom. Yeah, he was supportive. But the people
around him and my immediate boss was very much against it, because
he thought it would interfere with the protocol that they were
doing and so forth.
So Tom worked out a solution worthy of Solomon. He said, OK, we
could do-- the magic number for phase I trials in those days was
14. If you got nothing in 14 patients, then you didn't go any
further. So we could do 14 patients with the first protocol, which
was called MOMP-- M-O-M-P.
And we had to do the workups ourselves. We couldn't use other
colleagues to work up the patients. And we had to go get the
patients ourselves. So Jack Moxley and I did all those things. And
the results were very encouraging.
And then Jack left. And I sat down and decided that we'd put
procarbazine. I was working on procarbazine. It was then called
[INAUDIBLE]. And I was working on it and doing the pharmacology in
the phase I study with it in Hodgkin's disease. It was a promising
candidate. So we put it in. And that became MOPP.
Also in those days, six weeks of therapy was it. They didn't get
more than six weeks. We reasoned that the marrow problems would be
acute. But you'd have to give it probably for a long period of time
to affect the tumor.
So we gave it for at least six months or to a complete remission
plus two months. And we assumed that there were cells left after we
couldn't see them. So it was a lot of good thinking that went into
it that turned out to be correct, because most of the-- since then,
a lot of protocols follow the same sort of routine. And it really
works for a lot of cancers.
But it was controversial. I went to the AACR meeting. This was
before ASCO. And I presented it as an abstract. And David
Karnofsky, who was sort of a god at that time at Memorial Sloan
Kettering, just tore me apart.
And what was I doing using the term complete remission for a solid
tumor. He said, that was a term that was used in leukemia. Now, I
didn't say it. But I'm thinking, the reason you use them is you can
get complete remission. So we had complete remissions.
And I was kind of shaking with the microphone in my hand at the
time. So it was a scary but it was a good experience.
I have to say--
So it just gives you an idea that people were not receptive
[INAUDIBLE].
Those of us who are junior to you can't imagine that you were
intimidated by somebody else [LAUGHS].
Well, I was a youngster, then. I was-- Jack Moxley and I, I would
say, thinking back, we were cocky. But the big guys in the field
could scare me. And Zubrod was a-- I mean, Karnofsky was a big guy
in the field.
Yeah.
He just had a hard time getting out of the leukemia mind frame. And
so of course, we've used complete remission since then in any kind
of solid tumor where you can get one.
In your book, you have a great quote that you presented somewhere.
And Dr. Frei was there. And Wayne Rundles was there. Wayne, of
course, has been at Duke for 100 years. And he said, do your
patients speak with you after you're done?
Well, Wayne Rundles-- when he first saw the MOPP protocol, Wayne
Rundles said, that's nonsense. He said, I get the same thing with
nitrogen mustard by myself. Well, nobody had ever got that with
nitrogen mustard. So we actually had to set up a controlled trial
and do it and prove that MOPP was better.
So when I presented it when we were first starting it-- at a
meeting. Tom had arranged this meeting with all the bigwigs in the
field. And when I presented it at that, everybody was sort of
quiet. And then Wayne Rundles raised his hand. He looked pale. He
raised his hand and said to me, Dr. DeVita, do your patients speak
to you after you do this?
[LAUGHS]
So he-- a few years later when we were obviously getting good
results, he invited me to grand rounds. And by then, we were good
friends. And I was up on the podium. And after I gave the talk, he
was sitting down below smiling at me.
And I said, Dr. Rundles, if you remember, you asked me if your
patients speak to you when you do this. And I can tell you that
they do for a lot longer. So it was fun. But it was fun. He was a
good friend by then. And I had great respect for him.
Actually, he was a very nice man.
He was.
When did you start thinking that you had a success? Was it during
those first 13 patients or 14 patients that you treated? I mean,
was it obvious right away, or did you start [INAUDIBLE]--
Well, it was obvious--
--you were in the wrong place?
We put-- no. We thought it pretty early, because we were worried.
We put patients in reverse isolation. Nobody knew whether you were
going to kill them if you gave them all these drugs together. And
it turned out the first surprise was, yeah, they had the usual
toxicity. But it really wasn't that bad. So it was doable.
And the second was-- we had a small number. But we had-- something
like 80% of the patients went into a complete remission. And I
think nobody had seen that. Now, the question was, how long were
they going to last?
So we were optimistic. And when we put patients on it, there was no
cure for them at that time. And we said, we're optimistic that this
is going to be something that will last. But we don't know.
And then by three years, it looked pretty good. And I think I
presented the first abstract four years after we started. And by
that time, we had relapse-free survival curves. And again, nobody
before that time had presented relapse-free survival curves in any
of the lymphomas. So by then, by four years, I think we felt we had
probably cured some patients with the disease.
I asked Bob Young this same question. Did you feel a sense of
history at the time, that this was really historical? Or did that
come later when you looked backwards?
I think what people don't realize about those days is neither
Freireich nor ourselves were treating leukemia and Hodgkin's
disease. In other words, we weren't out to develop a treatment for
those diseases. We were out to prove you could cure cancer with
drugs, because nobody believed it. If you said that, they really
thought you had gone balmy.
So we were out to look-- so we knew if we could do it, it would be
historic. So we were excited when we looked like maybe it was going
to happen. By that time, when we had first reported it, the VAMP
program that Freireich did, which was an historic program-- he only
had 17 patients. And they actually never published a paper on VAMP.
And I asked Jay why they never did that. And he said because he
didn't think they would accept it anywhere.
So but by that time, they were getting about a 50% complete
remission rate going four or five years. And they were thinking
they're curing leukemia. And we were getting 80% complete remission
rates. So I think everybody felt that we were going to prove that
you could cure cancer with the drugs. And we did.
So yes, in a sense, we set out to do something that would be
historic. And so when it happened, I think, it is. It was a sort of
a door opener for medical oncology in Hodgkin's disease.
I'd like to turn now for just a minute to your role in politics.
You were pretty instrumental, I think, when the National Cancer Act
was signed in 1971. And that also sounds like a TV drama to me. It
sounds like-- and I know this anyway, but in reading your book, it
was not clear that was going to get through. Can you give us some
of the playground behind that and Mary Lasker's role and how that
happened?
Well, Mary Lasker played a big role. The MOPP program actually
played a big role, because Mary Lasker was sort of working in the
background. Cancer was always a cause for her.
But when we did the MOPP program, there was a guy named Luke Quinn,
who she had hired to be a lobbyist, who was sort of hidden in the
American Cancer Society so they wouldn't realize it was Mary
Laskers' lobbyist. And he was referred to me by Sidney Farber.
And I didn't want to take him at first, because he was diagnosed as
having gall bladder cancer. And I said to them, you know-- I said
to Sidney Farber, I don't really treat patients with gall bladder
cancer. And there was silence on the phone. And he said, (SOMBER,
COMMANDING VOICE) you will take this patient.
[LAUGHS]
So I took the patient. And when I examined him, when he came down
and I examined him, he had adenopathy in both axillae. And gall
bladder cancer just doesn't do that. So I had to do another
biopsy.
He was not a pleasant guy. So it was not easy to do these things. I
had to get another biopsy. And it turned out that my pathologist at
the time, Costan Berard, when he compared the biopsy, he said, it's
a lymphoma, clearly. It was a diffuse, large cell lymphoma.
What they had done is, because Claude Welch did the surgery-- a
very famous abdominal surgeon-- and he said it was gall bladder
cancer, that the pathologist sort of assumed it was. And it was a
compression artifact. Long story short, he went into remission.
And Mary Lasker went gaga. Wait a minute. We got something here.
And that was what pushed her to get her friend, Senator Ralph
Yarborough, to put up a committee on cancer to come up with the
Cancer Act. And--
So it must have been quite a day when President Nixon signed
that.
Yeah, well, it was-- I wasn't at the signing. I wasn't high enough
up in the chain to be invited to the signing. But yeah, I have all
the photos of him signing it. And later when I met him-- I have a
picture in the book of he and I shaking hands and him looking like
he's having a roaring laugh. People ask me what I said that was
funny. And I have no idea.
But when I asked him, I said what is your greatest achievement as a
president? He said two-- opening up China and signing the Cancer
Act. So he was--
Really?
Yeah, so I think he was proud that he did that.
That's a great story. Actually, the other story I had not heard,
but read in your book-- I'd like you to tell me about your lunch
with Mr. Featherstone.
[LAUGHS] Featherstone Reid, his name was. Well, this was a very--
this was a regular occurrence. Mary Lasker, when she came to town,
would stay with Deeda Blair, Mrs. William McCormick Blair, who was
a Washington socialite and had a lovely house on Foxhall Road.
And they would have lunches and dinners. And they always arranged
it so that people-- the scientists sat next to somebody with
influence. And this is how they influenced the Congress to put more
money into the cancer program.
So one time, I got a call in the morning from Deeda Blair, saying,
I'm having a lunch. We'd like to have you there. And I said, gee,
I-- it's too short notice. I can't do it. And she said, well, Mary
really wants you to be there. Mary was hard to say no to.
So I rearranged my schedule, drove down to Deeda's house. And there
was a big black limo sitting in the front of the house. I went in,
and they introduced me to Featherstone Reid. I had no idea who he
was. And every time Mary would say, we want more money for research
with leukemias and lymphomas. Vince, tell him about what's going
on. And I would tell him about.
At the end of the lunch, he left. And Mary and I sat down on the
couch to have a cup of coffee. And I said, Mary, who is
Featherstone Reid? And she said, he's Warren Magnuson's driver. And
when she saw the shock on my face-- Senator Warren Magnuson was the
chairman of the appropriations committee of the Senate.
When she saw the shock on my face, she said, wait a minute. When
Mrs. Maggie-- he takes Mrs. Maggie shopping during the day. And
Mrs. Maggie-- he fills her with all this information we're giving
him. And then Mrs. Maggie is the last person to put her head down
on the pillow next to Warren Magnuson.
This is the way she worked. She would take someone like Magnuson,
who was a good friend, but she would surround him with extraneous
people who would say the same thing. So it was sort of like
subliminal stimulation for him. He was always hearing these
positive things. And then he supported the program. She was a piece
of work.
I never got to meet her. But it sounds like she was a force of
nature.
She was.
And of course, the Lasker Award is now named for her and her
husband and sort of the American Nobel Prize. She's had such
[INAUDIBLE].
Yeah, and our crew won it in 1972-- Frei, Freireich, myself, and
other people for other things. So I'm very fond of Mary Lasker,
obviously.
It's just a wonderful story.
And I got to know her pretty well, so.
I have one other question. And I'm not sure you'll want-- if you
don't want to go off on it, we can edit it out. But in your book,
you talked about Howard Skipper and Frank Schabel. And Dr. Frei
used to talk about them all the time.
And I think it's worthwhile to bring them into the history of what
we do. Did you actually work with them or collaborate with them, or
just base some of your ideas on what they had in mind?
When I was starting at the Cancer Institute, I thought Schabel
worked at the Cancer Institute-- I mean, Skipper worked at the
Cancer Institute, because I would be working in the lab. I was
doing the tritiated thymidine studies on L1210 mice. And he would
be looking over my shoulder.
He was doing the similar studies, but he was just doing it with
cell counts in the abdomen of the mice. And he thought that was
good enough. And he was there at a weekly meeting we had, which
George Canellos named the Society of Jabbering Idiots. It was a
great, great meeting, actually.
[LAUGHS]
And he was there all the time. And my view and Tom's view differ a
little bit on Skipper. I think he was a real driving force, that he
did the studies in mice that we were doing in the clinic with
people.
And he actually-- in 1964, he wrote a paper showing that you could
cure L1210 leukemia. It was the first example of curing a mouse
with leukemia. And I think-- so it was sort of a feedback mechanism
between the Cancer Institute and the Southern Research
Institute.
So and he did-- he used to do these booklets. And I think he
published hundreds of these booklets. Some of them, we convinced
him to actually publish as papers. But I have the collection. There
may be 100 booklets he wrote.
And he would take a concept that we were working on and then work
through it in mice. It was very, very important. And he was a
wonderful person. His only problem was he smoked like a chimney.
But he was-- I liked Frank and Howard.
Yeah, Dr. Frei had the entire set of monographs on his bookshelf in
his office and would encourage us to come in and borrow them and
read them and come back. And frankly, he basically predicted what
you've done with combination therapy. He predicted adjuvant therapy
working. There were just a number of things he saw in these mice
that we've gone on to apply in the clinic. It's pretty remarkable,
I think, so.
Yeah, I mean, it's not only he predicted it. But he actually showed
the concept worked in mice. So as we know, mice and human are very
different [INAUDIBLE]. There was a guy in Boston, Stuart
Schlossman, a very fine scientist. And he didn't like mouse models.
And when asked what he would do when he saw a tumor-bearing mouse,
he would say, I would step on it, because he didn't believe mouse
models.
And but Frank and Howard did experiments and made allowances for
the difference between humans and mice. So it was always good to
know. I mean, I have the summary he wrote on Hodgkin's disease
after he saw the MOPP program. So I think they're very instructive
booklets. So I kept them. Like Tom, I think that we sort of live by
them.
Well, thanks for discussing them. I think our listeners need to
remember these two guys. They were great.
We're running out of time. I've really just touched the surface of
what you've done and contributed to the field. And the people
you've trained is sort of a who's who of oncology, frankly. But at
the end of the day, what's your-- I'll ask you the same question
you asked President Nixon. And that is, what is your legacy? What
do you want people to remember that Vince DeVita did?
I get asked that question a lot. And I don't have one thing that I
can say. I mean, I've been lucky in my career that I've had a
chance to do many things.
Being the Director of the Cancer Institute was wonderful. You could
sit on top of the whole field and just sort of scan it and see
what's going on. And it was very important, because you've become
the spokesman of practicing physicians at the same time.
MOPP, of course, was important. Putting out the first comprehensive
textbook in the field and watching it-- we just came out with the
11th edition-- is also very exciting. So there-- we were the first
to successfully treat Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. And we
reported it in a paper in the New England Journal. I mean, there
were a lot of things.
I'm best known, I think, for MOPP, probably, and the principles of
MOP, which I'm very proud of. But there's so many that I have a
hard time. I like opera. And people ask me, what's my favorite
opera? And I usually say, it's the one I just saw.
It's very hard for me to pick one opera. There's so many that I
like. So I'm not dodging it. But I just never can say, well, it's
this.
That's very fair. Frankly, I think, without your contributions, I
probably wouldn't be sitting here doing what I do. And I think
there are thousands of us who would say that. So we're--
Well, that's very flattering.
Well, not only are we appreciative, more importantly, there are a
lot of people who are alive who wouldn't have been without what you
and your colleagues did at the NCI that so many years ago, so--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I was involved in the training of 93 medical oncologist. At one
time, something like 40% of all the [INAUDIBLE] directors were our
graduates. So they have gotten around. And that was good for the
field. They went out with the same principles we were developing at
the Cancer Institute, so that's very gratifying.
Have you kept in touch with any of the patients that you're treated
back at the NCI? I talked to Saul Rosenberg. And he told me he
still sees people that he treated 30 or 40 years ago when he first
moved to Stanford.
We're writing a paper on the 45-year follow-up of the first 188
patients. Again, nobody has 45-year follow-ups. And we called every
one of the survivors. And there's something like 60% or so of the
complete remissions are alive.
So I talked to some of them. But we had a nurse talk to a lot of
them. And I got messages from them after the call. And some of them
still contact me, after sort of an anniversary of their treatment.
So yeah, I've kept up with them.
The gratifying thing is most of them are suffering from the same
illness as most people who are getting into their 70s or some of
them 80s. They have hip problems and so on and prostate cancer. But
there doesn't seem to be any really major increase in anything in
these long survivors.
Now, mind you, these were patients who got MOPP as their only
treatment. And so when you see second tumors in these kinds of
patients, it's usually patients who got radiation therapy plus
MOPP. So these patients who are 45 years had just got MOPP. And
they seem to be perfectly fine.
That's remarkable. I love your comment that they are getting the
same illness as the rest of us get as they get older. That's
great.
Yeah, we don't cure bad hips and bad knees and--
Yeah, we can't cure old age. When I was at the Dana-Farber, I had a
patient who had been one of Sydney Farbor's original patients from
the early '50s. And by this time he was obviously an adult. He was
older than I was. And he was fine, as you've said.
Although he said Dr. Farber kept treating him and treating him and
treating him. And then finally, when Dr. Farber passed away,
someone else picked up his chair. And they said, why are you still
getting this? And they stopped it.
Yeah.
So he got a lot of treatment.
I had one of Freireich's VAMP patients. She was a girl in her early
teens. And she was a wildcat. But she had had something else, and
it failed. And she was one of the first patients on VAMP. And she
went into remission. And she stayed in remission.
And I followed her for many years. She went to college. She got
married. She had children. She brought her children in to see me.
And last time I had any follow-up with her, she was in her 60s. And
she was one of the really first long survivors of that particular
program. So it's really neat to see these patients.
And it's not rare for me to go to a meeting and have people walk up
to me and say they got MOPP 25 years ago. Someone else gave it to
them. And they're alive and well. So that's one of the great gifts
of having a chance to do this kind of work.
What a privilege. Well, I think we need to end. Again, I want to
thank you for being on with us today and filling us in with some of
these stories. Had really good feedback for my podcast series. And
it's because of the people I've had on it. So thank you very much
for all you've done.
It's really good talking to you. And I look forward to listening to
all your podcasts.
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