This previously unavailable memoir by Charles Gordon Zubrod has been made available through the Cancer History Project by his family, with a foreword by Otis Brawley and Paul Goldberg.
Read the foreword here.
An obituary of Zubrod appeared in The Cancer Letter Jan. 29, 1999.
Zubrod served as head of the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment (appointed in 1956), NCI scientific director (1961-1974), Professor and chair of the department of oncology at the University of Miami School of Medicine and director of the Florida Comprehensive Cancer Center (1974-1990), and AACR President (1977-1978). He was also a Lasker Award recipient (1972).
Zubrod’s achievements include:
- Establishing the cancer clinical trials cooperative group system, beginning with the Acute Leukemia Group B, started with James Holland.
- Starting a program to recruit clinical associates to NCI.
- Establishing the NCI Leukemia Service and hiring two physicians with similar names, Emil (Tom) Frei III and Emil J Freireich, to run it and develop effective treatments for the disease.
- Developing quantitative methods that remain in use today in clinical trials and cancer treatment, including the phase I, II, and III system, endpoint measurements, the Zubrod scale, and flow sheets.
- Establishing NCI’s virus research program.
- Organizing and defending NCI’s drug development program.
The book was originally published privately and circulated to friends and family. It has been reproduced below as a scanned PDF, with a new foreword.
