The Vatican's Search for Cancer's Miracle Cure

The Vatican might seem an unlikely place for a medical conference, but in this case it was fitting. The thread that likely connects Catholicism with immunotherapy runs all the way back to February 22, 1952, when a twenty-nine-year-old housewife in Baltimore noticed that her four-year-old daughter, Ann O’Neill, was pale and feverish, her neck mottled with blue. Only a few days later, doctors at St. Agnes Hospital had diagnosed the girl with acute lymphatic leukemia, a type of cancer that impedes normal white-blood-cell production. Several months later, after a brief partial remission, Ann was placed in an oxygen tent and given no more than a day to live. As her mother told a reporter in 1963, the girl “had lost all spirit: it was almost as if life were gone and just some reflexes were left.”