Sometimes, cures can even surprise the doctors who’ve delivered them.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Larry Einhorn was a young doctor treating cancer patients. But he noticed that the standard drug used to treat testicular cancer only succeeded five to 10 percent of the time. So, he tried adding a second drug to the treatment regimen. It worked. “I was amazed that the introduction of an experimental drug literally had a one-logarithmic increase in the cure rate, going from five percent in a contemporaneous actinomycin-D to 64 percent in this original phase II clinical trial,” he later said.

Needless to say, he didn’t stop at two-thirds success. By the 1980s, he had developed an even more effective treatment. “In a mere 12 years,” he points out, “we demonstrated that we no longer need two years

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