David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

wanted to work there. I had seventy kids
who died on me that year. It was a
nightmare.”^6
Not for Freireich. I was never
depressed. I never sat with a parent
and cried about a child dying. Freireich
teamed up with another researcher at
NCI named Tom Frei. Together, they
became convinced that the problem was
a lack of platelets—the irregularly
shaped cell fragments that float around
in human blood. The leukemia was
destroying the children’s ability to make
them, and without platelets their blood
couldn’t clot. This was a radical idea.
One of Freireich’s bosses at NCI—a
world expert in the field of hematology