The partnership between Evelyn Lauder, her doctor, and tens of thousands of donors
n 1988, Evelyn Lauder, the vivacious wife of cosmetics titan and major philanthropist Leonard Lauder, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She decided to begin treatment with a well-regarded oncologist who offered conventional measures. Leonard knew that as a survivor of the Holocaust and the London Blitz, Evelyn’s every instinct raged against defeat, but fear had closed her off to more promising but riskier options. He felt that he must intervene.
After casting a wide net, Leonard went to see Larry Norton, a breast oncologist then at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Young and iconoclastic, Norton was determined to find new ways of treating this disease that took the lives of more than 46,000 women every year. During the 1970s and ’80s, he and colleague Richard Simon at the National Cancer Institute had applied an old mathematic model of population growth to breast-tumor biology. They theorized that small tumors, like populations, would multiply slowly until they reached a critical mass, when the growth-rate would soar. That called for striking early.
By subjecting small tumors to intense chemotherapy and reducing the time between treatments, Norton and Simon theorized that they could stay on top of cancers before they proliferated beyond control. At the time, their theory was heresy within the medical establishment. Later, their treatment would be recognized in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute as “the greatest clinical trial innovation in 20 years.”
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