A doctor who made some important discoveries had an idea about using infection to treat cancer.  He didn&#x27;t bother with the proper process, he just went and did it on three patients.  2 of them died about as quickly as they would have anyway.  We don&#x27;t know if they were in more pain or not.  1 of them lived for about a year, and that person&#x27;s relative described that year as very low quality of life. It&#x27;s possible that the treatment kept this person alive, in this awful condition, much longer than she would have lived without the treatment.<p>He did this because he thought he was doing the right thing.  It&#x27;s clear to most people that he wasn&#x27;t doing the right thing, and after he was discovered all the investigators were very clear that he&#x27;d done the wrong thing.<p>That story is contrasted with a team who did the right thing: they noticed a plausible mechanism of action; they gathered evidence; they got permissions; they did animal studies.<p>I don&#x27;t mind the length of the article, but I agree that it wandered around a bit.