https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/12/18/vincent-devita... is a good take on the work (remember when people used to blog?), and includes some good examples in the same stream of cancer treatment history where it's clearer that cancer researchers trying things on patients without government approval is not clearly necessary and certainly not sufficient for advancing the state of clinical practice.
Super interesting history.
That blog entry is interesting but it's based on an article Malcom Gladwell wrote about DeVita's book; the author says he hadn't read the book himself. It does make some good points. I feel there ought to be a middle ground, where physicians are professionally expected to base decisions on good science (rather than "our patients would vomit on the way home if we gave them the effective dose"), but also we don't have government officials prohibiting terminal patients from getting treatments that oncologists think could help them.
For details, see the book The Death of Cancer by Vincent DeVita, director of the Yale Cancer Center and former director of the National Cancer Institute.