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Excerpts from Sid Mukherjee's Cancer Tome (with malice towards none...but as an example of what Personality can do....gps):
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"...By the late 1980s, hospitals and, increasingly, private clinics offering (bone) marrow transplantation for breast cancer had sprouted up all around America, Great Britain, and France with waiting lists that stretched into several hundreds of women. Among the most prominent and successful of the megadose transplanters was Werner Bezwoda, an oncologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who was recruiting dozens of women into his trial every month. Transplant was big business: big medicine, big money, big infrastructure, big risks....
....In the gleaming new wards of the Norris Center in Los Angeles, where Fox was undergoing her transplant, the story of Werner Bezwoda's remarkable success with megadose chemotherapy was already big news. In Bezwoda's hands everything about the regimen seemed to work like a perfectly cast spell. A stocky, intense, solitary man capable, Oz-like, of inspiring both charm and suspicion, Bezwoda was the self-styled wizard of autologous transplantation who presided over an ever-growing clinical empire at Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with patients flying in from Europe, Asia and Africa. As Bezwoda's case series swelled, so, too, did his reputation. By the mid-1990s he was regularly jetting up from South Africa to discuss his experience with megadose chemotherapy at meetings and conferences organized all around the world. "The dose-limiting barrier," Bezwoda announced audaciously in 1992, had been "overcome" --- instantly rocketing himself and his clinic into stratospheric fame.
Oncologists, scientists, and patients who thronged to his packed seminars found themselves mesmerized by his results. Bezwoda lectured slowly and dispassionately, in a bone-dry deadpan drone, looking occasionally at the screen with his sideways characteristic glance, delivering the most exhilarating observations in the world of clinical oncology as if reading the Soviet evening news. At times the ponderous style seemed almost deliberately mismatched, for even Bezwoda knew that his results were astounding. As the lights flickered on for the poster session at the annual oncology meeting held in San Diego in May 1992, clinicians flocked around him, flooding him with questions and congratulations. In Johannesburg, more than 90% of women treated with the megadose regimen had achieved a complete response --- a rate that even the power-house academic centers in the United States had been unable to achieve. Bezwoda, it seemed, was going to lead oncology out of its decades-long impasse with cancer...
...When Bezwoda returned to the annual cancer meeting in Atlanta in May 1999, he was clearly triumphant. He rose to the podium confidently, feigning irritation that his name had been mispronounced during the introduction, and flashed his opening slides. As Bezwoda presented the data --- his monotone voice washing over the vast sea of faces in front of him --- a spell of silence fell over the audience. The wizard of Wits had worked magic again...
....Bezwoda left the meeting in a hurry, leaving behind a field awash with confusion and tumult. He had underestimated the impact of his data, for it was now the sole fulcrum on which an entire theory of cancer therapy, not to mention a $4 billion industry, rested. Oncologists had come to Atlanta for clarity. They left exasperated and confused.
In December 1999, with the benefits of the regimen still uncertain and thousands of women clamoring or treatment, a team of American investigators wrote to Bezwoda at Witwatersrand to ask if they could travel to Johannesburg to examine the data from his trial in person. Bezwoda's transplants were the only ones that had succeeded. Perhaps important lessons could be learned and brought to America.
Bezwoda readily agreed...
...The whole thing was a fraud, an invention, a sham. In late February 2000, with the trial unraveling and the noose of investigations tightening around him every day, Werner Bezwoda wrote a terse typewritten letter to his colleagues at Witwatersrand admitting to having falsified parts of the study (he would later claim that he had altered his records to make the trial more "accessible" to American researchers). "I have committed a serious breach of scientific honesty and integrity," he wrote. He then resigned from his university position and promptly stopped giving interviews, referring all questions to his attorney. His phone number was unlisted in Johannesburg. In 2008, when I tried to reach him for an interview, Werner Bezwoda was nowhere to be found...."
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Excerpts from Sid Mukherjee's Cancer Tome (with malice towards none...but as an example of what Personality can do....gps):
*******************************************************************************************************
"...By the late 1980s, hospitals and, increasingly, private clinics offering (bone) marrow transplantation for breast cancer had sprouted up all around America, Great Britain, and France with waiting lists that stretched into several hundreds of women. Among the most prominent and successful of the megadose transplanters was Werner Bezwoda, an oncologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who was recruiting dozens of women into his trial every month. Transplant was big business: big medicine, big money, big infrastructure, big risks....
....In the gleaming new wards of the Norris Center in Los Angeles, where Fox was undergoing her transplant, the story of Werner Bezwoda's remarkable success with megadose chemotherapy was already big news. In Bezwoda's hands everything about the regimen seemed to work like a perfectly cast spell. A stocky, intense, solitary man capable, Oz-like, of inspiring both charm and suspicion, Bezwoda was the self-styled wizard of autologous transplantation who presided over an ever-growing clinical empire at Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with patients flying in from Europe, Asia and Africa. As Bezwoda's case series swelled, so, too, did his reputation. By the mid-1990s he was regularly jetting up from South Africa to discuss his experience with megadose chemotherapy at meetings and conferences organized all around the world. "The dose-limiting barrier," Bezwoda announced audaciously in 1992, had been "overcome" --- instantly rocketing himself and his clinic into stratospheric fame.
Oncologists, scientists, and patients who thronged to his packed seminars found themselves mesmerized by his results. Bezwoda lectured slowly and dispassionately, in a bone-dry deadpan drone, looking occasionally at the screen with his sideways characteristic glance, delivering the most exhilarating observations in the world of clinical oncology as if reading the Soviet evening news. At times the ponderous style seemed almost deliberately mismatched, for even Bezwoda knew that his results were astounding. As the lights flickered on for the poster session at the annual oncology meeting held in San Diego in May 1992, clinicians flocked around him, flooding him with questions and congratulations. In Johannesburg, more than 90% of women treated with the megadose regimen had achieved a complete response --- a rate that even the power-house academic centers in the United States had been unable to achieve. Bezwoda, it seemed, was going to lead oncology out of its decades-long impasse with cancer...
...When Bezwoda returned to the annual cancer meeting in Atlanta in May 1999, he was clearly triumphant. He rose to the podium confidently, feigning irritation that his name had been mispronounced during the introduction, and flashed his opening slides. As Bezwoda presented the data --- his monotone voice washing over the vast sea of faces in front of him --- a spell of silence fell over the audience. The wizard of Wits had worked magic again...
....Bezwoda left the meeting in a hurry, leaving behind a field awash with confusion and tumult. He had underestimated the impact of his data, for it was now the sole fulcrum on which an entire theory of cancer therapy, not to mention a $4 billion industry, rested. Oncologists had come to Atlanta for clarity. They left exasperated and confused.
In December 1999, with the benefits of the regimen still uncertain and thousands of women clamoring or treatment, a team of American investigators wrote to Bezwoda at Witwatersrand to ask if they could travel to Johannesburg to examine the data from his trial in person. Bezwoda's transplants were the only ones that had succeeded. Perhaps important lessons could be learned and brought to America.
Bezwoda readily agreed...
...The whole thing was a fraud, an invention, a sham. In late February 2000, with the trial unraveling and the noose of investigations tightening around him every day, Werner Bezwoda wrote a terse typewritten letter to his colleagues at Witwatersrand admitting to having falsified parts of the study (he would later claim that he had altered his records to make the trial more "accessible" to American researchers). "I have committed a serious breach of scientific honesty and integrity," he wrote. He then resigned from his university position and promptly stopped giving interviews, referring all questions to his attorney. His phone number was unlisted in Johannesburg. In 2008, when I tried to reach him for an interview, Werner Bezwoda was nowhere to be found...."
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