CANCER THERAPY PIONEER: William Coley trialed many cancer treatments alongside his immunotherapy toxin. “What’s maybe not so well known is that he helped bring radiation therapy to Memorial Sloan Kettering,” says sociologist David Hess. “That ultimately led to the demise of his own therapy.” Here, Coley is depicted administering radiation therapy in 1902, just seven years after the discovery of X-rays. The hospital’s director, James Ewing, was committed to developing the therapy, and eventually prohibited Coley from using his toxins to treat hospital patients.ROBERT HOKE, COURTESY OF THE MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER ARCHIVESAt the end of 1890, a young bone surgeon named William Coley watched in despair as an 18-year-old girl died from sarcoma over the course of a few months. “There are certain types of sarcoma that seem almost hopeless from the start, and when surgical skill, if called upon, only proves how utterly powerless it is,” he wrote in a report describing the case.
According to sociologist David Hess of Vanderbilt University, this girl’s death prompted Coley—now known as the father of immunotherapy—to investigate alternatives to surgery in the treatment of cancer. “He looked over hospital records and found a sarcoma patient who had had a bacterial infection,” Hess says. “This patient was alive—seven years later.”
Coley decided to experiment. In the summer of 1891, he began injecting his patients with live (and, later, heat-killed) cultures of streptococcal bacteria, sometimes directly into their tumors. The inoculations induced fevers; then, apparently as a result, some patients’ tumors shrank.
At the time, many researchers “expected that cancer would turn out to be an infectious bacterial disease,” explains Hess. Coley’s treatment made sense—the injected microbes must be killing the pathogens responsible for ...
