Chemotherapy

Time Magazine cover June 27, 1949

Effective medicines are usually discovered accidentally, and chemotherapy in no exception.

The lucky accident that made modern cancer chemotherapy possible occurred in 1942, ironically as a result of war. In that year, a United States naval vessel sank while in the harbor at Naples and the containers containing mustard gas it was carrying exploded. When the victims who had been exposed to the poisonous gas were examined, it was found that large numbers of the cells in their bone marrow had disappeared. The significances of this was not lost on C.P. "Dusty" Rhodes, the chief of the biological branch of the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service, who was on leave from Memorial Hospital Cancer Center, where he was the director. He began large-scale testing on animals of hundreds of drugs similar to the poisonous gas that went down with the ship. These drugs were found to inhibit lymphoid tumors in animals.