David's Story Research Articles

AIDS: A Personal Perspective that Engenders Hope

I was deeply moved by David Sanford's Wall Street Journal article, which follows. As David's story recounts, he came to me in deep despair. He believed that there was little hope to escape what is commonly termed a "death sentence" from AIDS. With state-of-the-art treatment, he has regained considerable health, as his HIV viral load has fallen to undetectable levels and his helper T-cell number has increased. How long these changes will be sustained and what the future holds are still unclear. But it is clear that David is pursuing life with great vigor and his sense of optimism and commitment to survive have been restored. I believe the hematologist/oncologist is in a particularly unique position in the clinical care of people with AIDS. Our history of conquering diseases which were, like AIDS, regularly associated with decline and death, gives us a perspective that engenders hope. I recall a friend and classmate in the fifth grade in Public School 187 in Queens, New York, who died of childhood leukemia. In those days, mentioning the word "leukemia" was forbidden, so our teacher informed us that Eric had died of "blood poisoning." We children all sat confused, wondering how to protect ourselves from such insidious "poisons." Childhood leukemia is now curable in the majority of afflicted children; I suspect that Eric would have been saved had the current treatment regimens existed in the early 1950s. Similar triumphs against lymphoma and testicular cancer are held up as real examples of progress in the field of oncology. I point to such victories in counseling patients with AIDS facing currently incurable diseases. AIDS is a moving target. Important breakthroughs in rational drug design provided us with the protease inhibitors, and laid the foundation for combination therapy which might potentially control the replication of the virus for decades and thereby restore longevity. Prospects for a true cure (full eradication of the virus from the system) are still hotly debated, but no one can deny that the clinical gains made in the last two years have been significant. We have witnessed the first clinical remission of AIDS. David Sanford's individual story is a mirror to the larger world of people with HIV. His restoration of health is not unique, not an isolated antidote, but a prototype of what is being seen in controlled clinical trials. Moreover, the importance of access to medical care, particularly new drugs, is evident from his tale. The impact of these new therapies on a humanitarian plane is the greatest, but its economic impact, with reduction of hospitalization, and increase in individual productivity, is also apparent. I find myself, as a physician, being importantly instructed by people like David Sanford. Our greatest gratification comes from science changing clinical reality, and restoring productive lives that become filled with realistic hopes.

Sympathetic postganglionic cholinergic fibres

Sympathetic postganglionic cholinergic fibres

The Transformed Cell: Unlocking the Mysteries of Cancer

Here we have the inside story behind one of the most media-exposed research projects of the last 20 years. The book is an easily readable and even exciting and entertaining description of the research that led to the discovery of the now famous lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells and the more recent, and perhaps more famous, tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) cells. The book presents in a highly dramatic and personal way the events that occurred in Dr Rosenberg's research career, which culminated in the first approved protocols attempting to use "gene therapy" to alter the genetic constitution of patients with malignant diseases. Here is a David and Goliath story told in fluent prose with an air of excitement, which should be entertaining to all readers. Our hero, David, is a person of enormous energy. He gets to the hospital regularly at 5:30 AM and works late into the evening. He is not

Cahan's David Levinsky: An Inner Profile

Although regarded by an increasing number of readers as an American classic, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky is still sometimes regarded simply as critique of capitalism, as the archetypal American rags-to-riches story, or as what one critic called the biography of a thinly disguised Abraham Cahan.1 Indeed, if the latter were the case, Cahan's autobiography Leaves from My Life would have sufficed him, much as Mary Antin's The Promised Land served her. Actually David Levinsky transcends nearly all Jewish-American immigrant literature, including The Promised Land and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts with their optimism and expectation, Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl with its abrasive cynicism, and Michael Gold's Jews Without Money with its lapses into doctrinaire Marxism. Perhaps the only immigrant novel to match or exceed Cahan's in depth and complexity is Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, which, like Levinsky, derives its power from brilliant mingling of external and internal reality. In Levinsky, however, the central character's internal life has been heretofore given minimal attention by critics because of the novel's emphasis on the facts of acclimatization to an alien culture and the achievement of power within that culture. Although David's story was originally published in 1913 as series of articles for McClure's Magazine on the rise of Russian Jews in the garment industry, it became in its later version not only profound meditation on the American dream but work of intense psychological realism.

Crime and Punishment, or Development, in Fairy Tales

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, OR DEVELOPMENT, IN FAIRY TALES When I was a small girl in rural Mississippi, my grandmother often sat by the fire in the evenings telling stories that she had heard in her own childhood. She told traditional folk tales and ghost stories (all supposedly true), which sent me to bed with tingling, thrilling terror, but her specialty was the fantastic moral tale; these terrified me beyond all hope, leaving me lying rigid, sleepless, and sweating under the covers. The most vivid of these was the well-known poem, James Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphant Annie," who "comes to our house to stay/Wash the cups and saucers up and sweep the crumbs away." In one of Annie's tales, a wicked little girl is carried away by evil spirits: "Her mama heard her holler, /Her papa heard her squall, /And when they turned the covers back, she wasn't there at all !/And the goblins will get you if you don't watch out." I also carry in my consciousness even now an image of a grinning, insinuating boogie man, hiding out behind the lilac bush, waiting and watching to see if I cried; whereupon, no doubt, he would fetch me away and perform unspeakable acts of torture upon my sin-ridden person. There were other Awful Warnings too. Once as I sat innocently sewing doll clothes on a Sunday afternoon, Grandma shrieked in horror that the Devil would bore holes in my tongue for sewing on the Sabbath. I need hardly elaborate on the horrific images suggested by this information. I know now from the relatively safe and analytical perspective of the adult student of children's literature, that these fantastic moral tales undoubtedly descended from what I term the didactic fairy tale (and ultimately , of course, from the medieval exemplum) . These didactic fairy tales were popular in the 1830' s and 1840' s in England. Such stories as "Uncle David's Story about Giants and Fairies," an interpolated fairy tale in Catherine Sinclair's realistic novel, Holiday House (1839); Francis Edward Paget' s The Hope of the Katzekopfs (1844); Mark Lemon's The Enchanted Doll, as well as the later works; Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1873); and George MacDonald1 s The Wise Woman (1875) all incorporate the archetype of departure and return and the conventions of fairy tale, as well as terrifying effects, in order to teach children, as Gillian Avery notes, "quite ordinary moral lessons." The stories I heard in my own childhood and even Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) are clearly descendants of the British didactic fairy tale. These writers employ the fantastic journey in the service of a narrowly focused and unpleasant didacticism. Frequently in traditional folk tales and in many excellent fantasies from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the archetype of departure and return reveals that the child protagonist is spirited into fairy land where he or she receives genuine spiritual or emotional insight, acquires a more profound sense of identity and the nature of things, and, like the Ancient Mariner, returns to the ordinary world a sadder but wiser child. In such stories fantastic journeys also serve a moral function, but it is an enlarged, mythic truth, not a simplistic lesson in moral conduct. Today, then, I would like to discuss the practices of writers of didactic fairy tales and to contrast them to fantasies which also incorporate the archetypal fantastic journey in the interest of expressing complex spiritual, ethical, or emotional truths: the Grimms' story, "Hansel and Gretel," Andrew Lang's The Gold of Fairnilee , and Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. Most of the earliest literary fairy tales and fantasies written from 1840 to 1850 in England were concerned with diagnosing, treating, and curing the moral ailments of children, as were writers of explicitly Moral and Matter-of-Fact tales. The attitude of most writers and adult readers of fairy tales at mid-century is represented by an anonymous review of Uncle Peter's Chair (a work which has apparently suffered oblivion) in The Atheneum , 1845; the reviewer describes the volume as "... intended for little boys and girls from 8 to 14...