Forty-five-year follow-up of a childhood leukemia survivor:Serendipity orkarma?

✍ Scribed by Ravindranath, Yaddanapudi

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 107 KB
• Volume: 33
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0098-1532
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-911x(199910)33:4<409::aid-mpo15>3.0.co;2-k

✦ Synopsis

LIVING HISTORY

One of the monumental discoveries in medicine during the last century was that recorded by Farber et al. in 1948. The team at the Boston Children's Hospital found that a simple compound administered systemically to children with leukemia caused a remission of the thitherto universally lethal disease.

Members of that research team who were then Fellows were asked recently to record their impressions of those heady days. What was it like to see peripheral blood smears, loaded with lymphoblasts, clear with the administration of aminopterin?

To be present at such epochal moments in the advance of medicine and science comes but once in a lifetime. Drs. Wolff, Mercer, and Sylvester have graciously consented to let us share in their recollections. An additional echo of those days is provided by Prof. Ravindranath who, by chance, met one of the first patients cured of leukemia 45 years before.