{"doi":"10.38051/9781800103672","title":"Cancer, Research, and Educational Film at Midcentury: The Making of the Movie \"Challenge: Science Against Cancer\"","abstract":"Cancer Institute (NCI).One day in the early s, Nancy Brun, then chief of the Information Resources Branch of the NCI's Office of Cancer Communications, came into my office to show me a scrapbook about a publicity campaign for a film that the NCI had released in called Challenge: Science Against Cancer.Neither of us knew much about this film, but the scrapbook documented a significant effort to promote it, with a wealth of primary sources between its covers: publicity pamphlets, press releases, clippings, photos, correspondence, invitation cards, plans for the campaign, and even the seating arrangements for one of the premieres of the film, along with other documentation such as the film script and narration.Nancy and I spent time leafing through the pages, and it seemed to me that it might one day be the basis for a journal article.It was not a priority, however, and I filed the scrapbook away.A few years later, I disinterred the scrapbook when I was working for the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).Paul Theerman, Mike Sappol, and I had persuaded HMD to develop a series of DVDs on historical medical and health films in the NLM's collection.My DVD was to be a selection of the historical cancer films in the NLM's collection (along with an introductory essay and notes on the individual films) and was to include Challenge.The DVD series never came about, and eventually mutated into the NLM website Medical Movies on the Web, now Medicine on Screen, but it revived my interest in Challenge.Paul, then HMD's head of Images and Archives, agreed, with the blessing of Elizabeth Fee (then chief of HMD), to fund a visit to the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which had produced the film, and the Library and Archives Canada to get some background material.It was then that my research life changed.The NFB had kept almost everything on the film so that it was possible to know, sometimes on a day-to-day basis, how the film came about and how it was sponsored, made, and promoted.","journal":"University of Rochester Press eBooks","year":2021,"id":227982,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9067,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":832345,"name":"David Cantor","orcid":"0000-0002-4830-7138","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":141,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:46.312854Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}