Anyone with any access to news is aware of many things of import that are ongoing in the politics of health care legislation. Of course these involve aspects of my most personal life. However I am offering this memoir as an example of principles that I believe can be applied in many areas as we seek to restore our nation to humaneness and civility..

There is much restoration to be done. The more I learn of how medical research, in particular for cancer, has changed since the days of my working in it the more alarmed I become about the health of my beloved profession. I am therefore going to write of the way it was in my time. The problems today are easy to know through other venues.

I was so privileged for my tenure in cancer research to have encompassed a large segment of the best of times for meaningful clinical research. In fact in the office across from mine one of the developers of the mammogram was at work. As with all memoirs, there are those whose recollections and interpretations likely differ but I believe the facts are as I indicate.

Until shortly before I became an actor in the field the conventional mind set was toward finding a single cure for a single disease called cancer. Treatment programs were primarily hierarchical. There were abundant NCI and other grants to various academic institutions to follow their particular research interests. A huge change in cancer outcomes began with the development of collaborative study groups involving several academic centers.

The pediatricians initiated a collaborative group that was multidisciplinary in composition. Many/most of the protocols for solid tumors at the beginning of therapy employed chemotherapy, surgery and irradiation in combination. There were a number protocols for hematological cancers that employed various combinations of chemotherapy and irradiation. I was an early principle investigator member of the only pediatric collaborative group.

In the less than 10 years I participated I saw cure rates for Hodgkins Disease and childhood solid tumors go from 3% to 50% Modest numbers of other lymphomas and leukemia cures were beginning to be achieved. (They are much better today.) The work of the pediatricians applied to adult cancers was increasing those cure rates also. Today the basic principles developed at that at time are still being applied.

When I left the field there was a large network of collaborating institutions across the country and virtually every cancer patient for whom there was no established treatment (or it had failed) was offered participation in a research protocol. Most accepted. The cost of the treatments was born by grants and the institutions. In the case of chemotherapy agents, pharmaceutical companies benefiting from our public supported research supplied them at no cost.

As far as I can tell this research model has now undergone great attrition. I have to say when I see drugs that I did Phase I, II, and even III studies are still (40 years later) standard, I wonder at what appears to be a tremendous slowing of research and the fruits thereof.

This a beginning article for validating and exploring the cause http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E2D9113DF936A15753C1A96F9C8B63 I do strongly disagree that it is the lack of volunteers. As one will discover in the text, the greater cause is lack of good studies due to decentralization, privatization of research and the love of money.

In my group the mutual goal was the treatment and alleviation of the symptoms of children afflicted with cancer. We collaborated! We were not secretive lonesome eagles trying to out do the other. I humbly suggest this is a model worthy of being restored