After the Luftwaffe bombed an Allied port in Italy on December 2, 1943, sailors began dying of mysterious symptoms. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander suspected it was from exposure to mustard gas—which had been concealed in American ships—but his report was immediately classified. Alexander's observations nonetheless caught the attention of pathologist Cornelius Rhoads, who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and as Jennet Conant recounts, it ushered in a new era of cancer research led by the Sloan Kettering Institute.