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

looking back on that experiment.
“Everyone said it was insane. What if
the children ended up somehow getting
CML as well? What if it made them even
sicker?” Freireich shrugged. “This was
an environment where the kids had one
hundred percent mortality in months. We
had nothing to lose.”
11 I have simplified the leukemia
story. See Mukherjee’s The Emperor of
All Maladies for a more complete
version. After Freireich and Frei
demonstrated that they could make
progress against leukemia with
previously unheard-of doses of
chemotherapy drugs, the oncologist
Donald Pinkel took over and pushed that
logic even further. It was Pinkel’s group,