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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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this summer to see if he could get any results by injecting the prostate with BCG or PPG. He couldn't get it going fast, there was great resistance or difficulties about getting it going, but in the last month or two he told me that they had two or three patients that they have injected, but so far I haven't got word about what has happened to them. I'll report on that next time, we meet, I hope.

Well, as I said, the illness and death of Al Fordyce just reinforced me in my feeling that I have to work harder in this maze of cancer research and try to get more specific things done, as well as to be sure that we have more money.

Q:

May I ask one question. You mentioned cobalt treatments which seems to be a fairly routine thing in the treatment of cancer cases and yet it so often doesn't seem to be very effective.

Lasker:

It doesn't work at all.

Q:

Why do they rely so heavily on it?

Lasker:

Well, sometimes they don't seem to know which types of cancer it's going to help and which it isn't, so they kind of give everybody cobalt, and it's like a kind of laying on of hands, it's doing something instead of nothing, you know. And once they've done that and it doesn't work -- sometimes it does work --

Q:

What percentage of the time would you say it works?

Lasker:

They're quite careful not to be too clear about this, because it depends a little bit on the tumor, location of the tumor.





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