PETER KEATING and ALBERTO CAMBROSIO. Cancer on Trial: Oncology as a New Style of Practice.

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In Cancer on Trial, Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio chronicle the development of medical oncology from the 1950s to the present. Focusing more on the clinic than the laboratory, the authors argue that the development of clinical cancer trials constituted a new style of practice that involved the creation of new institutions, ideas, and technologies that continue to evolve today. They convincingly show that the new style of practice developed internationally, across the United States and Europe, and illuminate how physicians, scientists, and statisticians exchanged information and technologies through a web of interconnected institutions and cooperative groups comprised of experts who worked in laboratories, clinics, and data centers. This meticulously researched and precisely written book is organized chronologically into three sections. The first begins in the 1950s and extends to the mid-1960s. It chronicles the addition of chemotherapy to the two existing cancer treatments: surgery and radiation. The success of the VAMP trial in 1962, to treat acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) in children, showed chemotherapy to be a legitimate, rather than heroic, treatment. This trial convinced investigators that chemotherapy research was not about finding magic bullets but instead about combining a series of compounds and technologies to create a therapeutic regimen. Cooperative oncology groups consisting of researchers and clinicians developed in the same period in the United States and Europe in response to the changing nature of cancer research and treatment. Their work advanced new epistemologies.