Heroes and heroines
Cancer advances were carried by people. Patients who said yes to the first trial when nothing else had worked. Families who built funds from a lemonade stand, a radio broadcast, a marathon on one leg. Advocates who refused to be operated on without being asked. Scientists who kept going through decades of rejection. This page names some of them and links each to the drugs, trials and ideas their lives touched.
49 people29 patients2 carers and family17 advocates19 pioneersPublic record only. Each record carries the date it was last checked.
Patients and families
People whose own illness, or a child's or a partner's, became a turning point: the first to take a new drug, the first to say so in public, the ones who turned a diagnosis into a fund or a campaign.
PatientLance ArmstrongSurvivor who built the Livestrong survivorship movement; later disgraced in sportTreated in 1996 for testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain, he founded the foundation that made survivorship a public cause and sold 80 million yellow wristbands. His doping and its exposure in 2012 complicate the legacy.PatientSharon BelvinEarly complete responder to ipilimumab whose recovery Jim Allison called the moment he knewDiagnosed with metastatic melanoma at 22, she received the anti-CTLA-4 antibody ipilimumab in an early trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering and has been cancer-free since. Her meeting with James Allison in 2006 is part of immunotherapy's history.PatientChadwick BosemanActor whose death brought early-onset colorectal cancer into public viewHe made Black Panther and other films while being treated for colon cancer, which he kept private. His death at 43 in 2020 forced attention on rising colorectal cancer in young adults and its heavier toll on Black Americans.PatientBarbara BradfieldFirst long-term survivor of the trastuzumab trialsIn 1992 she was the first patient with recurrent HER2-positive breast cancer to be treated with the antibody that became Herceptin, in Dennis Slamon's trial at UCLA. She became its first long-term survivor.FamilyKatie CouricWidow, journalist and later patient; the on-air colonoscopy that lifted screening ratesAfter her husband died of colon cancer at 42, she had a colonoscopy live on national television in 2000. Screening rates rose measurably afterwards: the "Couric effect".PatientBetty FordFirst Lady who spoke openly about her mastectomy in 1974Weeks after becoming First Lady in 1974 she had a mastectomy and, unusually for the time, said so publicly. Clinics recorded a surge of women coming for breast examinations.PatientTerry FoxPatient whose Marathon of Hope built Canada's largest cancer research fundraiserAfter losing a leg to bone cancer at 18, he set out in 1980 to run across Canada for cancer research. He covered 5,373 km before the disease returned; the run he started has raised over C$850 million.PatientJade GoodyPatient whose public illness lifted cervical screening attendance in BritainA reality-television star whose cervical cancer and death at 27 in 2009 were followed by hundreds of thousands of extra cervical screening tests in England: the "Jade Goody effect".PatientKate GrangerDoctor and patient who started #hellomynameisA geriatrician with a rare sarcoma who noticed that the staff treating her did not introduce themselves. Her 2013 campaign, #hellomynameis, was adopted by hundreds of thousands of health workers.PatientEinar "Jimmy" GustafsonThe boy behind the Jimmy FundA 12-year-old lymphoma patient of Sidney Farber whose 1948 radio broadcast launched the Jimmy Fund, which has funded Dana-Farber for more than 75 years.PatientKris HallengaFounder of CoppaFeel!, the first breast cancer charity aimed at young peopleDiagnosed with incurable breast cancer at 23 after her symptoms were dismissed, she founded CoppaFeel! in 2009 to teach young people to check their chests. She lived with the disease for fifteen years.PatientDame Deborah James"Bowelbabe": patient, broadcaster and fundraiser for bowel cancer researchDiagnosed with bowel cancer at 35, she spent five years telling people to check their poo, co-hosted the BBC's You, Me and the Big C, and raised over £11 million for Cancer Research UK in the weeks before her death in 2022.PatientSteve JobsPatient whose delay of surgery for a neuroendocrine tumour became a public debateDiagnosed in 2003 with a rare, slow-growing pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, he put off surgery for about nine months while trying diet and alternative approaches. His case is the standard example in discussions of delay and unproven therapies.PatientAngelina JoliePatient whose public account of BRCA1 testing and risk-reducing surgery changed testing uptakeHer 2013 New York Times essay about carrying a BRCA1 mutation and choosing preventive mastectomy roughly doubled referrals for hereditary cancer testing in several countries: the "Angelina Jolie effect".PatientAshya KingChild whose family's fight for proton therapy changed access in BritainIn 2014 his parents took him from a British hospital to seek proton beam therapy for a brain tumour abroad, were arrested, then vindicated. The case sped the building of NHS proton centres.PatientRose KushnerJournalist who ended the one-step mastectomy and put patients in the roomDiagnosed in 1974, she refused the standard practice of biopsy and mastectomy under one anaesthetic without the patient's say. Her campaign made the two-step procedure and informed choice the norm.PatientHenrietta LacksPatient whose cells became the HeLa line; the case that reshaped research consentHer cervical cancer cells, taken in 1951 without her knowledge, became HeLa, the first immortal human cell line. Her story changed how consent and family rights in research are handled.PatientAudre LordePoet whose Cancer Journals reframed illness, prosthesis and silenceAfter a mastectomy in 1978 she wrote The Cancer Journals, refusing a prosthesis and the expectation that women hide their cancer. The book became a founding text of patient writing.PatientRandy PauschProfessor whose Last Lecture became a public reckoning with terminal pancreatic cancerA computer scientist with terminal pancreatic cancer who gave a lecture in 2007 on achieving childhood dreams. Tens of millions watched it, and he testified to Congress for pancreatic cancer research funding before he died at 47.PatientGilda RadnerComedian whose ovarian cancer inspired Gilda's Club and a hereditary cancer registryThe Saturday Night Live star wrote about her ovarian cancer in It's Always Something and died at 42 in 1989. Her name lives on in Gilda's Club and the familial ovarian cancer registry at Roswell Park.PatientBud RomineFirst patient in the imatinib (STI571) phase 1 trialA retired railway engineer from Oregon with chronic myeloid leukaemia, he was the first person to take the drug that became Gleevec, in June 1998, after reading about Brian Druker's research in a newspaper.PatientRobert SandlerChild whose remission on aminopterin in 1947 was the first in leukaemiaA two-year-old with acute leukaemia treated by Sidney Farber with the folate antagonist aminopterin from December 1947. His temporary remission, reported in 1948, was the first evidence that a drug could turn back leukaemia.PatientAlexandra "Alex" ScottChild with neuroblastoma who started Alex's Lemonade StandDiagnosed with neuroblastoma before her first birthday, she set up a lemonade stand at four to raise money for her hospital. By her death at eight in 2004 it had raised $1 million; the foundation in her name has raised hundreds of millions since.PatientStephen SuttonTeenage patient whose bucket list raised millions for young people with cancerDiagnosed with bowel cancer at 15, he turned his final years into a public campaign that raised more than £5 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust before he died at 19.PatientJim ValvanoBasketball coach whose ESPY speech founded the V Foundation for Cancer ResearchDying of metastatic cancer, he told an audience in 1993, "Don't give up, don't ever give up," and announced a foundation that has since granted hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer research.PatientEmily WhiteheadPatient whose case launched CAR-T for childrenThe first child treated with CAR-T cells, in 2012. Her recovery from relapsed leukaemia turned an experimental idea into an approved therapy.
Advocates and builders
People who built the institutions, coalitions and movements that moved money, changed rules and put patients in the room.
AdvocateNancy BrinkerFounder of Susan G. KomenShe promised her dying sister, Susan Komen, that she would end breast cancer, and in 1982 founded the organisation that created the Race for the Cure and made breast cancer a mainstream cause.AdvocateMary LaskerPhilanthropist and lobbyist behind the National Cancer Act of 1971She turned the American Cancer Society into a research funder in the 1940s, built the Lasker Awards, and led the lobbying that produced the 1971 National Cancer Act and the modern NCI budget.AdvocateEvelyn LauderCo-creator of the pink ribbon and founder of the Breast Cancer Research FoundationA breast cancer survivor and Estée Lauder executive who co-created the pink ribbon in 1992 and founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993, now one of the largest private funders of breast cancer research.AdvocateSusan LoveBreast surgeon, author and founder of the Army of WomenHer Breast Book gave women the information to question their surgeons; she co-founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition and in 2008 recruited hundreds of thousands of women into research through the Army of Women.AdvocateDame Cicely SaundersFounder of the modern hospice movementNurse, social worker and doctor who opened St Christopher's Hospice in 1967 and established that pain in advanced cancer could be prevented with regular oral morphine and attention to the whole person.AdvocateFran ViscoFounding president of the National Breast Cancer CoalitionA lawyer treated for breast cancer in 1987 who built the National Breast Cancer Coalition and won the Department of Defense breast cancer programme, the first to put trained patient advocates on scientific review panels.
Pioneers
Scientists and clinicians who saw something the field did not accept, and kept going until it did.
PioneerBrian DrukerPhysician-scientist who brought imatinib to patients with chronic myeloid leukaemiaHe pushed a shelved kinase inhibitor through the laboratory and into a 1998 trial when few believed a targeted pill could work. Imatinib made chronic myeloid leukaemia a disease people live with, and became the model for targeted therapy.PioneerGertrude ElionChemist who designed 6-mercaptopurine and the first rational anticancer drugsWithout a doctorate, she and George Hitchings designed drugs to block DNA building blocks. Their 6-mercaptopurine of 1951 remains part of the cure for childhood leukaemia; she won the Nobel Prize in 1988.PioneerSidney FarberPathologist who produced the first chemotherapy remissions in childhood leukaemia; father of modern chemotherapyIn 1947-48 he showed that the folate antagonist aminopterin could send childhood leukaemia into remission, the first drug ever to do so. He then built Dana-Farber and, with Mary Lasker, won the 1971 National Cancer Act.PioneerBernard FisherSurgeon whose NSABP trials ended the radical mastectomy and established adjuvant therapyHe argued that breast cancer is a systemic disease from early on, then proved in randomised trials that lumpectomy with radiation equals mastectomy and that tamoxifen after surgery, and even before cancer, saves lives.PioneerJudah FolkmanSurgeon-scientist who proposed and proved that tumours depend on new blood vesselsIn 1971 he proposed that tumours cannot grow beyond a few millimetres without recruiting blood vessels, and that blocking them could treat cancer. Dismissed for decades, the idea produced bevacizumab and a class of drugs.PioneerIan FrazerImmunologist who, with Jian Zhou, created the technology behind the HPV vaccineIn 1991 he and Jian Zhou made HPV virus-like particles in the laboratory, the basis of the vaccines that could eliminate cervical cancer. Australia, where the vaccine was rolled out first, is on course to do so.PioneerEmil J FreireichPioneer of combination chemotherapy and the cure of childhood leukaemiaAt the NCI in the early 1960s he and Emil Frei gave children four drugs at once, VAMP, against fierce opposition, and turned a uniformly fatal leukaemia into a curable one. He also worked out platelet transfusion.PioneerHarald zur HausenVirologist who showed that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancerAgainst the consensus that herpes was to blame, he proposed in 1976 that papillomaviruses cause cervical cancer and isolated HPV16 and HPV18 from tumours in 1983-84, making vaccination and HPV testing possible. Nobel Prize 2008.PioneerJimmie HollandFounder of psycho-oncologyA psychiatrist who set up the first full-time psychiatry service in a cancer hospital at Memorial Sloan Kettering in 1977, founded the field's societies and journal, and made distress a vital sign in cancer care.PioneerTasuku HonjoImmunologist who discovered PD-1 and opened the way to anti-PD-1 therapyHe discovered the PD-1 molecule on T cells in 1992 and showed it acts as a brake on immune attack. Blocking it produced nivolumab and pembrolizumab, now used across dozens of cancers; Nobel Prize 2018.PioneerEmil "Tom" Frei IIIPioneer of combination chemotherapy; long-time physician-in-chief of Dana-FarberWith Emil Freireich he showed that combinations of drugs could cure childhood leukaemia, then extended the idea to Hodgkin lymphoma and to adjuvant treatment after surgery.PioneerMary-Claire KingGeneticist who proved inherited breast cancer exists and mapped BRCA1In 1990 she showed that a single gene on chromosome 17, BRCA1, causes inherited breast and ovarian cancer, when most of the field doubted such a gene existed. Genetic testing and risk-reducing care followed.PioneerElisabeth Kübler-RossPsychiatrist who made the dying patient's experience a subject of medicineHer 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on interviews with terminally ill patients in a Chicago hospital, made it acceptable for doctors to talk with patients about dying and helped launch the American hospice movement.PioneerDonald PinkelFirst director of St. Jude; devised Total Therapy for childhood leukaemiaAs the founding director of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in 1962 he designed Total Therapy, combining drugs with treatment of the brain and spinal fluid, and raised childhood leukaemia cure rates from near zero to about half within a decade.PioneerJanet RowleyGeneticist who showed that chromosomal translocations cause cancerWorking part-time at her dining-room table in 1972, she showed the Philadelphia chromosome in CML is a swap between chromosomes 9 and 22. Cancer had a genetic cause, and imatinib later hit the fused gene.PioneerJane Cooke WrightPioneer of chemotherapy for solid tumours; co-founder of ASCOAt Harlem Hospital in the 1950s she showed methotrexate could shrink breast and skin cancers, tested drugs on patients' own tumour cells, and in 1964 was the only woman among the seven founders of ASCO.PioneerJian ZhouVirologist who co-invented the HPV virus-like particle vaccineA Chinese virologist whose skill in expressing viral proteins made the first HPV virus-like particles in 1991. He died in 1999 at 42, seven years before the vaccine reached the public.
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Every entry here rests on a public source: a foundation page, an obituary, a published account. If someone changed cancer through their case, their campaign or their work and is not listed, open an issue with a link and a sentence on what changed because of them. Living private individuals are added only with their own public account.
Editor’s note. Two names were suggested for this page, recorded as “Sid” and “Diana”, the latter in connection with Jason Laster’s wife’s case. We could not identify either from public sources and have not added them, rather than guess. If you know who they are, please send a link.
Open a suggestion on GitHub →Why this matters
Almost every drug on this site exists because someone agreed to be the first to take it, and almost every screening programme fills up when a person, not a leaflet, tells their story. Yet patients still lack understanding, navigation and agency in their own care. The people on this page show what changes when they have it. See the bottleneck Patients lack understanding, navigation and agency and the ideas attached to it.