Op-Ed Columns

Relay for Life is one of those annual rites when sadness and happiness come packaged together, a neatly-wrapped-though-odd combination, like beer and chocolate. Tears of grief. Tears of joy. Just when you think it's OK to be maudlin, to cry for the departed, there's another smiling face to snap you out of it.

For the fortunate, life does go on.

Tonight, it will.

Oxford High School's football stadium will be sardine-packed, fence-to-fence, with smiling faces and cackling children and emotional cancer survivors. There will be a band, though I'm not sure how many people will listen to it, and events and exhibits and lots of finger food and enough glowing luminarias to cause a south Georgia forest fire.

When the sun sets, I'll stumble around until I find the little white bags filled with sand and a candle and adorned with familiar names. My mother, who died of cancer. My wife's friend, who died of cancer. My friend and mentor, who died of a form of leukemia. We'll stop there.

Instead, let's think of this:

Who will be cancer's Walter Reed?

Before Reed's name became a euphemism for the mistreatment and neglect of wounded U.S. military personnel, Reed was a Virginian born into a Methodist family before the Civil War. When the hostilities arrived, the teenage Reed was too young to shoulder a gun and wear Confederate gray, but he survived nonetheless. Reed, writes author Molly Caldwell Crosby in The American Plague, “drank knowledge” and possessed “tools for success — lofty principles and swelling determination.”

Reed — whose older brother, James, lost a hand to a Yankee cannonball at Antietam — did not have the educational resume to gain admittance to the University of Virginia and study for a master's of art degree. But he did gain a conditional entry into the university's medical school, and, as Crosby insightfully describes, became the youngest medical-school graduate in the school's history, a place he still holds today.

Reed was 17.

Before he died in 1902 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Reed's ground-breaking and controversial research in Cuba attacked the long-standing medical belief about the deadly yellow fever virus, the 18th and 19th centuries' plague of death.

Brought to America from West Africa, yellow fever killed more than 100,000 in the United States and infected more than half a million. A horrible epidemic in 1793 forced the U.S. capital to move from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. New Orleans suffered devastating losses from the disease. Memphis ceased to exist as a city — it lost its charter because of its pronounced drop in population — when thousands of residents died in an 1878 epidemic. More U.S. soldiers in the Spanish-American War died from the disease than they did from bullet wounds. And Crosby adds that the disease's impact was indeed felt worldwide, as the deaths of 23,000 French troops to yellow fever stationed in Haiti caused Napoleon to call off his plans to conquer North America.

Mainstream medical experts of the time thought the fever was contagious.

Reed disagreed. He felt that mosquitoes transmitted the virus, and proved so when he and his team of American and Cuban doctors set up a controversial camp near Havana and, among other things, used human experiments to test his theory.

There is no yellow fever cure. The disease still exists, especially in Africa's fever-prone areas; the “yellow-fever belt,” Crosby describes it. But Reed's out-of-the-box research -vivisection that today would not be allowed — led to the creation of a yellow fever vaccine, one of the great successes of American medicine.

We need cancer's version of Walter Reed.

Tonight's festivities are fine and well intentioned. They bring needed awareness, and donations for cancer research, to a disease that is the nation's second-leading cause of death. It strikes the healthy and the weak, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, smokers and those who've never lit a Marlboro. Cancer's U.S. reality is grim: 2007 is expected to bring more than 1.4 million new cases and more than 559,000 deaths — more than 1,500 American cancer deaths each day. Unlike so many other afflictions, this dreadful disease often seems inescapable and amazingly unfair.

Finding a cure or vaccine may never happen.

But we have to try.

When reading about the miraculous work by doctors like Walter Reed and Jonas Salk, whose research led to a vaccine for polio, it only makes one wonder whose efforts will lead to the discovery of cancer's cure. Whose name will join Reed's and Salk's among the heroes of modern-day medicine? Through the use of stem cells or gene therapy or cancer-killing viruses — or a method still undiscovered — which researcher will uncover the secret to cancer's evil?

That would be a reason to relay. To celebrate cancer's end.