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Dread Decision. The patients in Memorial Hospital are never used as experimental animals. Neither are they denied any treatment, however new, that might possibly do them good. Virtually all patients beyond the help of surgery are willing to have new drugs and treatments tried on them.
In each individual case, the doctors have to make a grim decision. Should they prolong a life that is sure to be "unsatisfactory?" Should they, by prolonging life, place a crushing burden on the patient's family? Should they, in desperate cases when everything else has been tried, use a drug so dangerous that it may kill the patient immediately? Such questions have no single answer. The doctors decide each case separately, considering such matters as the painfulness of the treatment and the patient's chance for happiness during his possible remission.
Some cancer doctors admit that they have almost cracked up thinking about such things, and about their utter helplessness in hundreds of cases. Dr. Rhoads, too, has his moments of depression. He is sure that his method of concerted frontal attack, submerging niceties of scientific temperament, is correct. But he also knows that neither he nor his men nor anyone else in the world has yet found a cancer cure.
Perhaps ... Sloan-Kettering is certainly trying hard. From his office on the 13th floor, Dr. Rhoads can review the work of the world's most impressive array of cancer-fighting weapons: the eggs with their little glass windows, the tubes of cancer tissue on their merry-go-rounds, the rows of deft-fingered girls with the squeaking, doomed white mice, the dangerous viruses, the green and white molds, the thousands upon thousands of chemical agents, the scholarly chemists, physicists, biologists, clinicians all working in unison to defeat the common enemy: cancer.
Perhaps at that moment in Memorial Hospital, a life frayed with pain and dimmed with morphine is flickering down to the cold. Dr. Rhoads is no callous technician. His confident eyes grow sad when he hears of this everyday event. He looks out the window at the cluttered roofs of New York and at a great bridge roaring with traffic. "It needn't be," he says, "not always."
*Asked if she would be afraid of a mouse in her own home, one of the girls replied: "Oh yes. Those are fierce, wild mice."
*This colony of cancer cells, which grew from a single cell in 31 days, has begun to spill out of a tiny glass tube. The cells are magnified about 70 times.