How’s that for a sensationalist headline? But before you turn away in disgust, here’s the story that pays it off:
Back in the 1890s, a surgeon named William Coley was searching for information on sarcoma, a type of bone cancer that killed one of his patients. He came across the record of a house painter with sarcoma, who had had four surgeries to remove the cancer.
Each time, the sarcoma came back. And then…
The house painter developed a severe streptococcus infection, which was close to killing him. He somehow recovered from the infection.
And when he recovered, his sarcoma — which no surgery could eliminate — was also gone.
Coley concluded that the infection killed the cancer. So he went around the country, preaching the new cancer-killing gospel, and purposefully infecting many cancer patients with streptococcus.
All the infected cancer patients got very sick. Some of those who didn’t die wound up cancer-free, just like the house painter.
As a result, Coley’s ideas and methods became popular in the early 20th century. But eventually, they were forgotten as radiation and chemotherapy started to develop.
It was only in the 1970s that Coley’s ideas resurfaced again. Scientists realized it wasn’t the streptococcus infection that killed the cancer. Instead, it was the body’s own immune system.
Long story sh-, scientists started trying to figure out how to activate the immune system to attack cancer cells, even without infecting the patient with a dangerous disease like streptococcus.
It would be a kind of holy grail. Because as one scientist working in the field put it, “the immune system is the most specific and powerful killing system in the world.”
Anyways, one big breakthrough came in 1996, when a harmonica-playing immunologist from Texas named James Allison located a “checkpoint” on a specific type of immune cell known as a T cell.
This checkpoint acts as a kind of brake, stopping the T cell from going on a rampage against foreign invaders and local slubberdegullions such as cancer cells.
Allison figured out a way to “cut the brake lines” of this checkpoint, activating the T cells, and killing the cancer.
Fast forward a few more years, and this new approach, known as immunotherapy, started becoming a standard cancer treatment.
That’s a giant breakthrough, because until now, there were only three major ways to get rid of cancer cells — cutting (surgery), burning (radiation), and poisoning (chemotherapy).
Immunotherapy is a fourth way, and it seems to work well in some otherwise hopeless cases. (A famous instance was former president Jimmy Carter, who had advanced melanoma successfully treated with a immunotherapy drug in 2015.)
So yeah.
It’s kindofa big deal.
And it was all cemented last year, when James Allison and another scientist, Tasuku Honjo, received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries of mechanisms related to immunotherapy.
The end.
What, you’re wondering what this has to do with copywriting?
Well, not much. And also quite a lot.
There’s no direct lesson from immunotherapy itself that I can spot right now.
But there is a general rule of copywriting that says you want to present convincing and credible proof to buttress your sale and to make the close.
And if you’re doing anything related to health (the way I often am), then there are few better pieces of proof than being able to say:
“Based on a Nobel-Prize-winning discovery”
This is something I’ve spotted often in top health sales letters, and I’ve also had it confirmed, in a throwaway comment during a webinar, by Parris Lampropoulos, who is the equivalent of a Nobel-Prize winner when it comes to copywriting.
And that’s why I’ve decided to regularly go back in the annals of Nobel Prizes, and see exactly what those folks did to win.
Anyways, now we’re really at the end.
Or as the brothers Grimm might say, my tale is done, there goes a goose; whosoever catches it, may make himself a pillow out of it. In other words, if you need more guidance on how to write effective sales copy, including strong proof elements, you might like the following: