But how will it happen?

A propos of nothing in particular, a memory came back to me this morning. I was a first year — more precisely, first month — oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute, and had the dubious honor of having bone marrow transplants as my first rotation. This was back when NCI did not require proof of legal residency to enter the campus, so we had quite a few referrals from all around the country for people who otherwise would never have been able to afford one. These were clinical trials of bone marrow transplants, but the risks of the research procedure — whether to use drug A or drug B, bot approved, to prevent graft versus host disease — were minor compared to the risks of a standard full-on allogeneic transplant, so before you think “but isn’t this undue influence?” let me reassure you that, for the most part, it was not. Anyway, one of these patients was a young woman with Burkitt lymphoma not responding to any chemotherapy you threw at it. I saw her in clinic early on during…