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

the usual frame of childhood didn’t exist
for them. It was shattered.”
9 The idea of administering repeated
bouts of chemotherapy—even after the
patient appeared cancer free—came
from M. C. Li and Roy Hertz at the
National Cancer Institute in the late
1950s. Li hit choriocarcinoma—a rare
cancer of the uterus—with round after
round of methotrexate until he finally
drove it from his patients’ bodies. It was
the first time a solid tumor had ever been
cured by chemotherapy. When Li first
proposed the idea, he was told to stop.
People thought it was barbaric. He
persisted. He was fired—even though
he cured his patients. “That was what