“The report says Martin probably died sometime late Friday night. Of course, it could be nothing.”
“But it’s interesting.” I loved how police minds worked. Maybe that was a hobby.
Matt glanced over at my lap, where I held the brochure Lorna had thrust at me.
“Think you’ll get anything from that?” he asked.
“Count on it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My desk had become a repository of brochures. I’d sent away for paper literature from several pharmaceutical companies, to give myself a break from reading long pages of text on my computer monitor. They all made promises, giving sweeping assurances of a better, cancer-free life for all. Strange how all avenues of thought seemed to lead to Matt’s disease.
I read about “smart medicines” that ignore healthy cells and go straight to the cancer cells; vaccines made from a patient’s own tumors, to “strike cancer right where it lives”; “small-molecule medicines” that disrupt the signal pathways of cancer cell receptors. All of these miracle cures involved drug delivery systems made possible with nanotechnology, the wave of the future; all designed to zero in on disease, to give families hope. So why wasn’t I feeling hopeful?
I opened the pamphlet from Lorna Frederick, a typical threefold affair, with bullets and clip art highlighting the research agenda. It was hard to distinguish the Charger Street lab brochure from those of commercial enterprises. The lab program had several joint projects with pharmaceutical companies, as I’d noticed on Lorna’s whiteboard.
I figured pharmaceutical companies had always promised utopia, but this was a new twist for research laboratories, at least in my experience. In my graduate school days, I was funded by the department I studied and worked in, not by a private, profit-making industry. I worked at my own pace, my only goal to satisfy my dissertation committee and myself. Charger Street scientists, it seemed, didn’t have that luxury.
The more I read, the more annoyed I became. This brochure is a funding tool, I reminded myself, meant to draw industrial partners into the work of research, to speed up the technology transfer process. A good thing. But what were the consequences for “pure research”? I wondered how scientists could remain objective with someone standing outside the doors of the lab, waiting not just for data, but for a certain kind of data. The it’s a go kind of data. It seemed to me the perfect environment to encourage fraud. If my entire budget would stand or fall based on the results of one clinical trial, one set of curves, I might be tempted to skew the data, just a little, just enough to keep my research alive. For the greater good, and all.
If I’d been looking for a reason to justify the fraudulent actions of some scientists, there it was.
I realized what I was most annoyed at was my own ambivalence. I wanted a drug on the market that would completely cure Matt’s cancer, but I didn’t want science to get dirty producing it.
I hadn’t slept well for several nights, and as a result, I dozed off in the middle of an article about tomatoes in a journal from a cancer treatment center. Tomato sauce, it said, if eaten regularly, can reduce the risk of prostate cancer. Tomatoes contain lycopene, which gives them their bright red color, and works as an antioxidant in the body. Tomato sauce—the staple of Matt’s youth, and mine.
Matt woke me up, coming through the front door, laden with his heavy briefcase and a bag of groceries. He looked to me like he also needed a nap, but I couldn’t be sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, as if I could see the cancer cells marching across his lower body, making him tired.
Matt looked at the loose pages of the journal article on my lap.
“Find anything interesting?”
“Yes, you need to eat more cooked tomatoes.”
He reached into the grocery bag and pulled out a cluster of deep red tomatoes.
“Lycopene!” I said.
We laughed, but we both knew it was time to get serious about treatment. We’d gone through the options for a Stage-II diagnosis, the first of which was called “watchful waiting,” to see if symptoms recurred. For Matt, the primary symptom had been a burning in his urinary tract. We’d read that patients with a low Gleason score have a very small risk of dying of their cancer within fifteen years if their cancer is never treated. Not good enough. Waiting was not high on my list of preferred responses, nor on Matt’s.
With a backdrop of a harvest moon outside our bay window, we sat on our couch and talked about excision of the prostate by irradiation; about the retropubic approach as opposed to the perineal approach to radical prostatectomy; about external and internal radiation therapy.