Why not a rose?
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Photo of a letter to the editor.
Saved by Stoppard
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of _Arcadia_ by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of _Arcadia_, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
Saved by Stoppard
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of _Arcadia_ by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of _Arcadia_, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
source: https://bsky.app/profile...
A letter to the editor in today's Times of London.
From Wikipedia: "Baum's team was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of adjuvant tamoxifen for early breast cancer, which has contributed to the 30 per cent reduction in breast cancer mortality and its efficacy in the prevention of breast cancer in susceptible women." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
A letter to the editor in today's Times of London.
From Wikipedia: "Baum's team was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of adjuvant tamoxifen for early breast cancer, which has contributed to the 30 per cent reduction in breast cancer mortality and its efficacy in the prevention of breast cancer in susceptible women." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
...so you couldn't get a letter to him? you had 32 years!