BETHESDA, Md. The teen surgeon was mystified. A fist-size tumor had been removed from the belly of his tolerant 12 years earlier, but his doctors had not been skillful to scuff out many smaller growths in his liver. The cancer should have killed him, still here he lay a propos the table for a routine gallbladder operation.
The surgeon, Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, examined the mans abdominal cavity, sifting his liver in his fingers, feeling for hard, dense tumors but he could locate no reference of cancer.
It was 1968. Dr. Rosenberg had a hunch he had just witnessed an wonderful lawsuit in which a cooperatives immune system had vanquished cancer. Hoping there was an elixir in the mans blood, Dr. Rosenberg got right of entry to transfuse some of it into a cooperative dying of front cancer. The effort unproductive. But it was the start of a lifelong quest.
Something began to burn in me, he would write compound, something that has never behind out.
Half a century in the middle of, Dr. Rosenberg, who turns 76 vis--vis Tuesday and is chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute here, is portion of a little fraternity of researchers who have doggedly pursued a purpose turbocharging the bodys immune system so that more cancer patients can experience recoveries back his long-ago patients.