Martin Pule is all about the abstract. “I’m really motivated by data. I’m not particularly motivated by seeing patients as individuals. I’m very happy that they do get better, but what we’re really trying to do here is something that’s much bigger than an individual patient.”
A healthy emotional distance is all well and good for a research scientist working on cures for cancer, but not the sort of thing to sustain a 100-minute documentary. So the focal points of Arthur Cary’s War in the Blood (BBC Two) were Dr Claire Roddie and two terminally ill leukaemia patients at London’s University Hospital, 53-year-old Graham and 18-year-old Mahmoud. Roddie was running trials for Pule’s Car-T cells – immune cells genetically engineered to target cancerous ones – aimed at identifying side-effects of the treatment, but always offering the possibility of a cure.
For Graham, who had prevailed over childhood chest troubles, it was indeed a war in the blood where any setback was akin to a personal failure letting down his family; his understandably protective wife Mellie tried to ensure that his dedication to the trial didn’t come at too heavy a cost. “He’s already talking about going skiing,” she marvelled. “I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding, but I’m also thinking, yeah, go you.”
Mahmoud offered a more subdued version of Graham’s determination to stay strong and stick around, talking often of his mother Fatouma and sisters; for such a young man with such wretched luck, the absence of self-pity was simply astonishing.
Cary’s approach was contemplative, measured and reminiscent of his very different take on resilience in the face of suffering, the Holocaust documentary The Last Survivors. Again, the material was given room to breathe, with interviews that probed his subjects gently, but at length. The results – Mahmoud’s reluctant, heartbreaking confessions (“I cherish every moment I’m with [my mum] even though I don’t show it”), allied to Graham’s complicated memories of a father who killed himself rather than live with Parkinson’s – made for wrenching viewing.
Roddie, meanwhile, confessed her worries over striking the balance between optimism and realism with patients undergoing such knife-edge treatments. Indeed, Graham’s recurring chest problems forced his reluctant departure from the trial, while Mahmoud’s illness returned shortly after he was declared cancer-free. Their options exhausted, death came with indecent speed.
Cary’s postscript acknowledged fellow patients now months in remission; a breakthrough felt both in our grasp and tantalisingly out of reach. The contributions of Graham and Mahmoud will live on. This was a powerfully affecting tribute to both.