Medicine: Mr. Cancer Research

For years after Cornelius Packard Rhoads graduated from Harvard Medical School (’24, cum laude), there was little in his life to suggest that his name would become synonymous with cancer research. Son of a Springfield (Mass.) ophthalmologist, young Dr. Rhoads took his internship under Boston’s great Neurosurgeon Harvey Gushing, then went to New York’s Trudeau Sanatorium (TIME, Dec. 6,1954), Adirondack Mountain headquarters for tuberculosis research and treatment. After a Boston stint in pathology, Dr. Rhoads joined Manhattan’s Rockefeller Institute, studied immunity to poliomyelitis. The institute sent him to the tropics to work on diseases of the blood. There he became interested in leukemia, commonest of “blood cancers.”

Ironically, Researcher Rhoads made medical history as the passive object of research. Victim in 1936 of a fulminating streptococcal infection, he became one of the first Americans saved by the first modern wonder drug, sulfanilamide. He lost only one finger instead of his life.

Dr. Rhoads edged closer to the mysteries of cancer in 1939, when he joined Manhattan’s Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases. The next year he became its director. Then, for the duration, Dr. Rhoads was preoccupied with wartime problems—blood procurement, gas casualties and atom-bomb casualties. There were no gas casualties, but nitrogen mustard and related poisons, unused in war, eased the symptoms and prolonged the lives of some cancer patients. “Dusty” Rhoads revived the idea, then out of medical fashion, that drugs might yet be found to treat and even cure cancer.

Tower of Hope. World War II’s crash programs on many scientific fronts brought Dr. Rhoads to another conclusion unpopular in medical circles: a frontal attack on cancer, with experts in a dozen sciences working toward the same goal, should pay off faster than the traditional uncoordinated approach of peacetime. In General Motors’ Boss Alfred P. Sloan Jr. he found a kindred spirit. Sloan put up the first $4,000,000, laid the foundations for the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research—a 14-story tower of hope beside Memorial Hospital. Rhoads was its director.

Lithe and energetic, crewcut, always hatless and usually coatless in the bitterest weather, Rhoads directed his campaign against cancer with a crusader’s zeal. He trod on many toes, was accused of being arbitrary and autocratic, of regimenting his 300 elite researchers and their supporting forces. Dr. Rhoads believed that the public must understand cancer research to support it, talked freely to the press. Subject of a TIME cover (June 27, 1949), he was photographed at the helm of his sailboat. This was what a willful band of little men in the New York County Medical Society had been waiting for. Jealous, they threatened him (always unofficially) with expulsion for publicity seeking. Though they never had the courage to act openly, they harassed him for a decade.

Self-Tested. Meanwhile, inspired largely by the drive and example of Dr. Rhoads and S.K. I., dozens of institutions plunged into the war on cancer, which has become today’s most concentrated medical effort (TIME, July 27). But Dr. Rhoads held the spotlight as “Mr. Cancer Research.” He worked night and day, lived over his office and laboratories in a penthouse apartment atop the institute. Forced by administrative duties to forgo active lab work, he went further, made himself a human guinea pig in tests on his own back of a possible cancer-causing substance. About this, Dr. Rhoads insisted, there must be no publicity.

Last week the ban was off. At his summer home in Connecticut, Cornelius Packard Rhoads, 61, died of a heart attack.