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Episode details

World Service,23 Dec 2019,9 mins

Fighting cancer

Witness History

Available for over a year

In the 1960s doctors began ground-breaking work into using several toxic chemicals at once to treat cancer. Combination chemotherapy, as it was called, would revolutionise cancer survival rates, particularly for Hodgkin Lymphoma, until then a virtual death sentence. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to the doctor who played a key part in that breakthrough, clinical oncologist, Vincent DeVita who has spent his more than 50-year career trying to cure cancer. Picture: Vincent DeVita (centre) and colleagues George Canellos and Bob Young circa 1971 (Credit: Joel Carl Freid)

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