Cancer on Trial: Oncology as a New Style of Practice

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At the beginning of Cancer on Trial, the authors remark that rather than providing a global picture of clinical trials, they have “sought more modestly to describe the evolving configurations of institutional, organizational, conceptual, human, and material resources that, through a remarkably dense network, have produced the now-taken-for-granted pillars of modern oncology: cancer clinical trials, treatment protocols, and the like” (9). This book is anything but a modest production—rather it covers the above issues and much more through a detailed rendering of the changing character of clinical trials from the early post-WWII period to the present. Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio have produced a major, demanding, and well-written piece of scholarship that traces the changing practices and ideologies of post-war clinical trials. Cancer on Trial is divided into three major sections. The first addresses the emergence of clinical trials from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s; the second covers the epistemology and practice of large-scale, multi-center cooperative clinical trials through the late 1980s; the third looks at the important role of molecular biology and the emergence of targeted therapy trials from the early 1990s onwards. Each section begins with a detailed discussion of an iconic clinical trial. In addition, there are two interludes: the first contains a brief overview of clinical trial statistics and the second covers the basics of molecular biology and oncogenes.