Linda Taylor, a 29-year-old naval officer, was not supposed to survive. She had metastatic melanoma, and back in 1985, there were no treatments that had even a chance of keeping her cancer under control. After trying a few drugs, her doctors sat her down and said, “Look, we just don’t have anything else.” There was nothing more they could do for her.
But while there were no proven effective treatments for advanced melanoma, there was an idea floating around. The idea was that the human immune system might be taught to attack and destroy tumors — that the patient’s body might be able to handle cancer all on its own.
Starting in the 19th century, there had been scattered hints that the immune system could sometimes overcome cancer. But nobody had ever been able to turn this observation into a reliable treatment, in part because the biology of the immune system was still mostly a mystery. Even as late as the 1980s, just a handful of people were pursuing this research.
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