Word: frei
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Problems arise, first of all, over the techniques of treatment. Both radiation therapy and chemotherapy are methods for the destruction of malignant growths in a live human being, and both can have extremely toxic side effects on the patients. Frei says that he feels limited by the federal laws that required detailed informed consent of the patients he would treat by these methods, and that it is hard to innovate with new drugs when the Food and Drug Administrations is very conservative about authorizing their administration to human beings...
...patients tested with new drugs," Frei says, "are patients with incurable cancer and have received all known acceptable treatment." Testing new and unknown drugs on these individuals, he says, may be worthwhile if only for the hope it gives the patient. "Hope," he says, "is an extremely important factor." What's more, Frei explains, failure to innovate in the National Cancer Institute hospitals may only lead desperate patients to seek new and glorious treatments from quacks. Laetrile, Frei points out, only becomes more attractive in the absence of innovative drug programs...
...Frei says that academic boards of authorities should be allowed to decide what chemicals can be administered to terminal cancer cases. As he said on the telephone to a colleague two weeks ago, "Many (cancer) centers have much more sophisticated people sitting around a table than the FDA has." Frei's image of a self-contained cancer center where researchers determine the limits on experimentation suggests the type of facility where heady and expert investigators can experiment on human beings with impunity, but he emphasizes the ethical obligation to serve the patient first, above any commitment to research. But Frei...
...cancer research boom of the last decade may, as Frei and others come close to admitting, reflect only the concern of legislators for a visible disease, second only to heart disease in its annual toll. Dr. Kurt J. Isselbacher, Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine at Mass General Hospital, has an official interest in the academic acceptance of the field. He is chairman of Harvard's cancer committee and says, as does Frei, that the basic biology of the cancer tumor, and the subtle distinctions that make its cells malignant, are valid concerns for the basic scientist/pure academic...
Both Hellman and Frei emphasize the modern and increasingly effective nature of "modality" treatment, involving several clinicians and even basic scientists in experimental cures. However, as Frei said in his phone conversation with a colleague, basic scientists are new to such clinical experimentation. He said that the same experimentation that a hospital's human studies committee approves may face opposition from basic scientists. "The trouble comes from the basic scientists," he said, "from the people who have never been involved in the treatment of anything more risky that poison...