The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War

The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War by Nikolai Krementsov. University of Chicago Press, $26/£16.50, pp 277. ISBN 0 226 45284 0. Rating: ★

At the end of the second world war, when Russia drew an “iron curtain” across Europe, the secret of atomic power was known only on the Western side. While espionage inevitably proved the most successful strategy in the long run, Russia's earlier plan to acquire this information by swapping it for its own top secret cure for cancer sounds like a great idea for a book, maybe even for a Hollywood film. Unfortunately, the high drama of these events seems to have influenced the author of The Cure too much. As a result, at times the style of what should have been a historical treatise seems to lapse into what can only be described as a hackneyed romantic thriller.

Set against the war-torn backdrop of Stalinist Russia, the essence of The Cure seems to be the far from moving tale of Gregorii and Nina, two brilliant Soviet scientists who meet, fall in love, and then—out of their barely controlled passion for each other's cytological and microbiological studies—produce their lovechild “KR,” a miraculous trypanosome extract that stops murine cancer dead in its tracks.

As a cautionary tale of how the state can seize early scientific results and distort them for its own purposes, this could have been a fabulous work. Several documents suggest that major names such as Molotov, the foreign minister, and even Stalin himself may have been involved in the plan to interest the Americans in the huge potential of KR, and yet carefully never reveal enough information to them to allow them to replicate or validate the data. The present day parallel of sketchy press releases about yet another potential cancer cure just before share options are announced in a small biotechnology company seem all too obvious.

For anyone who has seen the rise and fall of new compounds as they have come through the various phases of drug development in oncology, the once top secret information that Krementsov presents about the efficacy of “KR” hardly seems impressive. The Cure should have been pitched as a magnificent tale of spin doctoring, and no more. Sadly, Krementsov instead chooses to act like a novelist and surmise the thoughts and emotions of his main characters. He presents Gregorii and Nina as two dedicated researchers who produced a fundamental oncological breakthrough 50 years ago that was played with and then discarded inappropriately by the Soviet machine as a result of political infighting and interdepartmental medical jealousy.

Ultimately, it seems as if Krementsov's desire to have heroic central protagonists in his drama leads him in the same direction as the Russian authorities as they grappled with KR's dwindling success and the loss of their potential atomic bargaining chip—towards trying to find something good to present out of almost nothing.