David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

slack, and Shuttlesworth walked up to the doors of First Baptist without a thread on his jacket disturbed. “Out of the way” was all he had said. “Go on. Out of the way.”
    That’s three remote misses.
    Losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob. It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound. But what happens to children whose worst fear is realized—and then they discover that they are still standing? Couldn’t they also gain what Shuttlesworth and the Blitz remote misses gained—a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage? 8
    “The officer who took Shuttlesworth to jail,” McWhorter writes of another of Shuttlesworth’s many run-ins with white authority, “struck him, kicked him in the shin, called him a monkey, and then goaded him, ‘Why don’t you hit me?’ Shuttlesworth replied, ‘Because I love you.’ He folded his arms and smiled the rest of the way to jail, where, forbidden to sing or pray, he took a nap.”

8.
    The work that Freireich had done in stopping the bleeding was a breakthrough. It meant that children could now be kept alive long enough that the underlying cause of their illness could be treated. But leukemia was an even harder problem. Only a handful of drugs were known to be of any use at all against the disease. There were the cell-killing drugs 6-MP and methotrexate, and there was the steroid prednisone. But each was potentially severely toxic and could be given in limited doses only, and because it could be given in limited doses only, it could wipe out only some of a child’s cancer cells. The patient would get better for a week or so. Then the cells that had survived would start to multiply, and the cancer would come roaring back.
    “One of the consultants at the clinical center was a man named Max Wintrobe,” Freireich said. “He was world-famous because he wrote the first textbook of hematology, and he had written a review of the current state of the treatment of leukemia in children. I have a quotation from him that I show my students to this day. It says, ‘These drugs cause more harm than good because they just prolong the agony. The patients all die anyway. The drugs make them worse, so you shouldn’t use them.’ This was the world’s authority.”
    But Frei and Freireich and a companion group at the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo led by James Holland became convinced that the medical orthodoxy had it backwards. If the drugs weren’t killing enough cancer cells, didn’t that mean that the children needed more aggressive treatment, not less? Why not combine 6-MP and methotrexate? They each attacked cancer cells in different ways. They were like the army and the navy. Maybe the cells that survived 6-MP would be killed by methotrexate. And what if they added prednisone into the mix? It could be the air force, bombing from the air while the other drugs attacked from the land and sea.
    Then Freireich stumbled across a fourth drug, one derived from the periwinkle plant. It was called vincristine. Someone from the drug company Eli Lilly brought it by the National Cancer Institute for researchers to study. No one knew much about it, but Freireich had a hunch that it might work against leukemia. “I had twenty-five kids dying,” he said. “I had nothing to offer them. My feeling was, I’ll try it. Why not? They’re going to die anyway.” Vincristine showed promise. Freireich and Frei tried it out on children who no longer responded to the other drugs, and several went into temporary remission. So Frei and Freireich went to the NCI’s research oversight board to ask for permission to test all four drugs together: army, navy, air force, marines.
    Cancer is now routinely treated with drug “cocktails,” complicated combinations of two or three or even four or five medications simultaneously. But in the early 1960s, it was unheard of. The drugs available to treat cancer in those years were considered just too dangerous. Even vincristine, Freireich’s prized new discovery, was utterly terrifying. Freireich learned that the hard way. “Did it have side effects? You bet,” he said. “It caused serious depression, neuropathies. The kids got paralyzed. When you get a toxic dose, you end up in coma. Of the first fourteen children we treated, one or two actually died. Their brains were totally fried.” Max Wintrobe