Part political thriller, part love story, Krementsov's account of a failed and now little remembered cancer therapy is a gripping read. The popular and accessible style of The cure and its considerable meditations on the romantic lives and attractions between the tale's chief protagonists, Russian scientists Nina Kliueva and Grigorii Roskin, certainly give the book an appeal beyond an historical audience; none the less, this is good history of medicine. The cure offers a solidly-researched, well-written account of the relationship of medicine and disease to wider social and political events and networks. It is, moreover, a particularly welcome addition to the literature on the history of cancer research and therapy, and more generally to the history of laboratory-based clinical research and its relationship to clinical practice.
Accounts of how post-Second World War and Cold War politics affected the development of experimental biology and experimental medicine in the US are quite numerous, but few consider the USSR in any depth. Work on Soviet science has, furthermore, tended to focus on the politics surrounding Sputnik or Lysenkoism; as such the world of Soviet microbiology and medical research cultures described in the pages of The cure is all the more interesting as most know so little of it. The co-constructed nature of science and culture is all too seldom discussed with such texture and nuance. Through his analysis of the lives and work of Kliueva and Roskin, Krementsov weaves the international and national politics of the Cold War with the local politics of a newly established medical research institute and relates all to a wider, somewhat combative, medical research scene. His account of the rise and fall of the pair under Joseph Stalin, followed by their subsequent rise to grace under Nikita Khrushchev, speaks starkly of the ways in which work deemed politically important was brought into the centre of political life in the USSR, and, as such, suffered terribly through the vacillations of policy and the whims of its leaders.
As part of the history of cancer research The cure works well too. Although analysis of failed innovation has for several years found a place within the history of medicine, most accounts deal in description and analysis of success and therapeutic transformation; but the history of cancer research is positively littered with failed innovation and unrealized breakthroughs, few of which have been documented by historians. The volume of medical and scientific work on cancer in the post-war era is staggering, so historians wishing to discuss this period would do well to overcome their squeamishness surrounding failure, and begin to find meaningful ways to discuss the nature and characteristics of work in a field where significant breakthroughs held the promise of almost incredible adulation and success (especially given the reputation of cancer as a scourge of the civilized world) but which were, due to the terrible intractability of the illness, very unlikely to be realized.
For Krementsov, however, the excitement and frustrations of cancer research merely reflect the bitter-sweet realities of scientific practice and our perceptions of it: “We tend to focus on successes, but spectacular success is a rare event in science. A much larger portion of scientific research never makes it into the public arena, and each rare success is based on—and impossible without—many hundreds of routine experiments and trials that go unnoticed by the public and are often regarded as failures. Yet in a way, the story of these ‘failures’ is often more realistic and ennobling than the rare triumphal tale.”
