In the beginning of Audrey Evans's career spent researching neuroblastoma, the most common cancer in babies, almost every child diagnosed with the disease would die. By the time she retired last winter after 60 years, however, that had all changed.
Early in her career in Boston, Evans recalls a pleasant surprise she received from a child who had been sent home to die. "Six months later the mother called back to say, 'would you like to follow up?' And everybody gulped." This child's cancer had regressed spontaneously. Evans and her colleagues began to realize that a significant number of kids experienced the same pleasant surprise, a finding that has helped revolutionize the scientific understanding of the disease.
At three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon last winter, after having packed up her office at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHoP), Evans quietly snuck out the back door, "with practically nobody knowing," ...
