Who was Sidney Farber?

Dr. Sidney Farber (1903-1973), who grew up in Buffalo, was a pediatric pathologist who worked at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital in Boston. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston is named in honor of Charles Dana, a philanthropist, and Dr. Farber.

When Dr. Farber began working at the Harvard Medical School, leukemia was thought to be a terminal disease. Even so, Farber was determined to find a cure for this disease. Leukemia is a disease of the white blood cell-making tissue of the bone marrow. At the time, most cancers were treated with either surgery or radiation, which would not work on blood cancers. Farber was convinced that if he could find a drug to chemically block folic acid, which stimulates growth of the bone marrow, it could stop the production of the bad bone marrow which causes the disease. At Harvard Medical School, Farber completed a preclinical and clinical evaluation of aminopterin, funded by the American Cancer Society. Out of 16 children used in the initial experiment, 10 went into remission. These clinical trials showed for the first time that induction of hematological and clinical remission in leukemia was possible and that leukemia was not necessarily a death sentence.