From Hackney Downs School he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the young age of 17. Galton was born in London, the son of a Hungarian-born general practitioner who had changed his name from Goitein. He published his results on busulphan (then called myeleran) for chronic myeloblastic leukaemia in 1953, and on chlorambucil-which is still in use-for leukaemia in 1961. He published clinical trials of alkylating drugs synthesised at the Chester Beatty. From then on, Galton spent two days a week looking after patients with leukaemia and lymphoma at Hammersmith. The patient, who was fully informed, had a three month remission, which was unheard of at the time. With the blessing of Haddow, Dacie, and Dacie's boss, Sir John MacMichael, he administered it to a patient with acute leukaemia at the Hammersmith. Shortly after joining the Chester Beatty, Galton obtained a sample of aminopterin, a potential leukaemia treatment, from America. Haddow oversaw a programme of synthesising and testing potential anti-cancer drugs. He worked under Alexander Haddow, who had discovered that carcinogens could retard the growth of tumours caused by other, unrelated, carcinogens, and that this might be exploited for cancer treatment. In 1947 Galton joined the staff of the Chester Beatty Research Institute (now the Institute of Cancer Research), attached to the Royal Cancer Hospital, now the Royal Marsden. Throughout his life Galton recorded patients' details in small notebooks, so that when he saw a new case he could compare it with previous patients and their histology. This was to sow the seeds of his later career.
He played a key role in this story, thanks to his acute observance at the microscope, and his ability to correlate these observations with what he saw in the clinic.Īs a young doctor at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford in 1947, he took a microscope slide of a patient's cells to the great haematologist John Dacie, later Sir John, at Hammersmith Hospital's postgraduate medical school. By 1987, when Galton retired, acute leukaemia was classified into many types, many curable, and most treatable, with patients surviving months or years. In the United States cancer chemotherapy was taking its first steps. The outlook for lymphoma and myeloma were equally bleak. In 1957, when he entered cancer research, the life expectancy of acute leukaemia patients was measured in weeks or even days. David Galton was one of the first medical oncologists and the first in the United Kingdom to produce remissions for patients with lymphoma and leukaemia.
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