Cancer Treatment Can Have Serious Side Effects

Chemotherapy helped cure Melinda Dutton's breast cancer, but it left her with a badly damaged heart. Bruce Ogden, who survived prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, lives with feminizing changes to his body from drugs he took to block testosterone that would have accelerated the malignancy. And Sally Coplin is almost totally deaf and can't produce saliva. Radiation treatment caused that, even as it rid her nasal passages of spiderweb-like tumors. Stories like these are what keep stem cell scholar and medical student Joyce Ma up late, mulling theories she hopes will make traditional, often toxic cancer therapies obsolete one day. "We are harnessing the power of the human body's ability to heal itself," sai...