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

matched the infection with the most appropriate antibiotic. Antibiotics were never given in combination. You gave a second antibiotic only when the first one stopped working. “One of the first things Jay said to us was, no deal,” DeVita remembered. “These kids spike a fever, you treat them immediately, and you treat them with combinations of antibiotics, because they’re going to be dead in three hours if you don’t.” DeVita had an antibiotic that he had been told should never be administered in the spinal fluid. Freireich told him to give it to a patient—in the spinal fluid. “Freireich told us to do things,” DeVita said, “that we had been taught were heretical.
    “He was subject to so much criticism,” DeVita continued. “The clinical associates thought that what he was doing was completely nuts. He carried the weight of it. They would insult him—especially the guys from Harvard. They used to stand in the back of the room and heckle. He would say something, and they would say, ‘Sure, Jay, and I’m going to fly to the moon.’ It was awful, and Jay was there, all the time, hovering over you, looking at every lab test, going over every chart. God help you if you didn’t do something for one of his patients. He was ferocious. He would do things and say things that got him into trouble, or go to some meeting and insult someone and Frei would have to come in and smooth things over. Did he care what people thought of him? Maybe. But not enough to stop doing what he thought was right. 10
    “How Jay did it,” he said finally, “I don’t know.”
    But we do know, don’t we? He had been through worse.
    In 1965, Freireich and Frei published “Progress and Perspectives in the Chemotherapy of Acute Leukemia” in Advances in Chemotherapy, announcing that they had developed a successful treatment for childhood leukemia. 11 Today, the cure rate for this form of cancer is more than 90 percent. The number of children whose lives have been saved by the efforts of Freireich and Frei and the researchers who followed in their footsteps is in the many, many thousands.

9.
    Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child no child should ever have to endure. Along the same lines, I asked every dyslexic I interviewed the question posed at the beginning of the previous chapter: Would they wish dyslexia on their own children? Every one of them said no. Grazer shuddered at the thought. Gary Cohn was horrified. David Boies has two boys who are both dyslexic, and watching them grow up in an environment where reading early and well counted for everything nearly broke his heart. Here were one of the top producers in Hollywood, one of the most powerful bankers on Wall Street, and one of the best trial lawyers in the country—all of whom recognized how central their dyslexia was to their success. Yet they also knew firsthand what the price of that success was—and they could not bring themselves to wish that same experience on their own children.
    But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. 12 Freireich had the courage to think the unthinkable. He experimented on children. He took them through pain no human being should ever have to go through. And he did it in no small part because he understood from his own childhood experience that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored. Leukemia was a direct hit. He turned it into a remote miss.
    At one point, in the midst of his battle, Freireich realized that the standard method of monitoring the children’s cancer—taking a blood sample and counting the number of cancer cells under a microscope—wasn’t good enough. Blood was misleading. A child’s blood could look cancer free. But the disease could still be lurking in her bone marrow—which meant that you had to go through the painful process of gathering bone marrow samples, over and over again, month after month, until you were sure