Book chronicles history of National Cancer Act, NCI-designated cancer centers
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Retired oncologist Donald L. “Skip” Trump, MD, FACP, has co-written a book detailing the history of the National Cancer Act of 1971 and the development of NCI-designated cancer centers.
The book — Centers of the Cancer Universe: A Half-Century of Progress Against Cancer — is intended to inform both cancer-knowledgeable and lay readers about how the National Cancer Act shaped the way basic and clinical cancer research and cancer care have evolved over the past 50 years.
Trump, a HemOnc Today Editorial Board member who served as CEO of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and founding director of Inova Schar Cancer Institute before retiring in 2019, and co-author Eric T. Rosenthal, a longtime medical journalist and founder of the NCI-Designated Cancer Centers Public Affairs Network, spoke with Healio about how the book came to fruition, its focuses and plans for future collaborations.
Healio: What prompted you to write this book?
Trump: Eric and I have known each other for several years and when I was CEO at Roswell Park, I asked Eric to help compile an oral history of the cancer center. We have always enjoyed working together, and shortly after I retired it occurred to me that there may be interest in a book that would link the passage of the National Cancer Act, its provisions for the establishment of the NCI-designated cancer centers and subsequent progress in cancer. NCI-designated cancer centers are an integral part of the foundation that has allowed cancer research and care to flourish during the past 50 years. However, the history of individual cancer centers is not particularly well known, even by some of the founders of those centers. A lot was known about Roswell Park’s early history, but when we dug into it, we found many areas of uncertainty, and a lot of that stems from limited available records. I spent time at the Chesney Archives at Johns Hopkins University and obtained information from University of Wisconsin that, paired with information derived from Eric’s history on Roswell Park, allowed us to spin off and gather information from other cancer centers.
Rosenthal: I have been working as a medical journalist and covering oncology specifically for more than 30 years. In 1990, I founded the NCI-designated cancer centers public affairs network, which was the first effort to coordinate communications among the cancer centers and the NCI with the goal of providing the public — through the media — with good and balanced information about cancer research from the very best sources. The topic of this book is one we both care a lot about. We felt that too many people, including medical professionals, had no sense of how far cancer research and treatment had come. We felt that through our knowledge from different perspectives, we could share professional and personal perspectives and anecdotes. We also knew enough important people and had been in contact with many seminal figures in oncology through the decades to be able to reach out to the community and collectively gather as much information as possible. It turned out to be a great partnership and we complemented each other in many ways.
Healio: Can you offer a brief synopsis of the book?
Rosenthal: We describe the National Cancer Act and how it developed the National Cancer Center Program and NCI-designated cancer centers. Through that narrative, we wanted to tell how far the medicine, science and culture of understanding of the disease have evolved over the years. It was an interesting journey in terms of the misconceptions that are out there and in getting perspectives from sources on the history of cancer centers. From a journalistic point of view, it was interesting to see how many different versions and stories existed. A few cancer centers thought they were the first NCI-designated cancer center. We called the NCI and tried to get background on when certain centers originated, and we found out that there is a federal records management mandate stating that records had to be destroyed every 7 years, so the NCI did not have records dating back more than 7 years in terms of the history.
Trump: We had several different target audiences in mind when writing the book, but we focused substantially on members of the cancer research and cancer care community — those with an interest in the history of the evolution of cancer care in this country. Parenthetically, another area that we touched on may be completely obvious, but at the time of the National Cancer Act, this country had no oncologists because oncology as a specific focus had not yet been developed.
Healio: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
Trump: What we hoped to tell was not only how the National Cancer Act came to be, but also the results of the act, specifically with reference to the founding of cancer centers, cancer subspecialties and the organizations that support those subspecialties. We also wanted to draw attention to the progress made in cancer research and cancer care that depended on the National Cancer Act and the NCI-designated cancer centers program.
Rosenthal: What makes this book unique is that we infused in it a lot of personal and professional experience. For example, in the first chapter, Skip recounts how during his residency at Johns Hopkins in 1971 he came across a patient with cancer who piqued his interest in a career in oncology instead of cardiology — the specialty he had intended to pursue. He talks about this patient, what he learned and how over the years he carried on communication with the patient’s son. In addition, we asked experts what they considered the three to five most significant advances in cancer research since the signing of the National Cancer Act. Many talked about not only the advances in basic science, but also population science advances and cancer control issues. They looked at the totality of oncology and all the things that helped influence those advances. We learned a lot from writing this book and many of the people whom we interviewed learned a lot, as well.
Healio: Are there plans to write other books in the future?
Trump: The writing of this book has provided the opportunity for at least one project already: a book on the history of Association of American Cancer Institutes. The history of our relationship suggests that we probably will do something together again in the not-so-distant future.
Rosenthal: If there is a compelling topic we feel we can bring our mutual synergistic skills together to tell, we probably would be interested in writing another book together. I have always been a believer in synergy and working with someone with common informational knowledge but from a different perspective is what makes this so rewarding.
For more information:
Donald L. “Skip” Trump, MD, FACS, can be reached at skip2dornoch1@gmail.com.
Eric T. Rosenthal can be reached at etrosenthal@verizon.net.
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Rosenthal ET and Trump DL. Centers of the Cancer Universe: A Half-Century of Progress Against Cancer. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021.
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