Min Chiu Li and Finding Chemotherapy

May I introduce you to Min Chiu Li, a Chinese-American scientist to whom many of us owe our lives or the lives of loved ones? In the 1950s, Li figured out a critical aspect about how the disease cancer works, leading to the successful employment of chemotherapy.

Min Chiu Li came to the United States to study medicine, and his career was in part guided by the vicissitudes of global politics. When the Chinese Revolution broke out in his home country, he stayed in America and worked at various hospitals. His research was initially unfocused, but when the Korean War broke out, Li serendipitously took a job at the National Cancer Institute rather than join the military.

It was at the NCI that Li developed his treatment of choriocarcinoma, a cancer of the placenta that had led to the death of 90% of sufferers within a year. Li and a team of researchers started giving a toxic but effective chemotherapy drug called methotrexate to the women with this type of cancer. Li’s significant contribution was his observation that hormones in the blood could act like a signal that cancer was present.

In particular, the hormone hCG was secreted by the cancerous tumors. And, it declined in choriocarcinoma patients who received chemotherapy treatment. Once the tumors receeded, everyone except Li thought that these cancer patients should stop getting methotrexate — the cancer drug had obvious horrible side effects. But Li noticed that hCG was still present in very small amounts, and so decided to continue giving the women under his care doses of the medicine until the hormone had completely disappeared.

Believing this treatment to be overly invasive and tantamount to harmful human experimentation, the National Cancer Institute fired Min Chiu Li. But Li was correct. The patients whose chemotherapy was halted early ended up sick again, while Li’s patients overcame their cancers. Today, choriocarcinoma is one of the most cureable cancers. Furthermore, Li’s work paved the way for much other cancer treatment, using hormones as disease markers and continuing chemotherapy after obvious malignant cells are no longer visable.