Those were the words of 21/2-year-old Alexander Horwin, as he pointed to artwork on the walls of Children's Hospital in L.A. in late 1998 during his second chemotherapy session for a brain tumor.

Those also were the words his dad, Michael Horwin, used to begin a California Western Law Review   article recently selected as the top student article in the nation. The Scribes Law Review Competition accolade is the law-school equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. Only one article can be entered from each of the 432 student-edited law reviews published by American Bar Association-accredited schools. Past winners have been from such schools as Yale, Columbia and U. of Chicago.

Horwin, now a medical malpractice attorney here, says he is honored and surprised (he didn't know his article had been submitted). But most important, he says, is the spotlight the award puts on a medical system gone awry – one that he contends "puts money and profits before life and health."

Loss precedes the win

Alexander died three months after his walk down that hospital corridor. The Horwins had battled the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for permission to use a potentially life-saving cancer treatment on their son, but lost. It was the fight for his son's life Horwin wrote about in the article, a piece that grew out of 21/2 years of research by him and his wife, Raphaele. She is pursuing a master's degree in forensic science.

Horwin says the FDA refused to let them employ a nontoxic cancer treatment developed by Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, a research scientist at Baylor University in Houston, unless they first  exhausted the more conventional approaches of chemotherapy and radiation for Alexander and the cancer returned. Before the FDA clamped down, another child, 21/2-year-old Dustin Kunnari, with the same type of medulloblastoma tumor, did receive Burzynski's treatment. Today, eight years later, Dustin remains cancer-free, Horwin said.

Fears of causing cancer

Horwin's article also questions the FDA's requirement – when a patient's condition is terminal – for time-consuming safety testing of treatments. It's rather ludicrous, he reasons, to worry about the possibility of a treatment causing cancer 20 years hence, when the patient is dying of the disease.

Horwin contends that the FDA plays into the hands of pharmaceutical industry heavyweights by thwarting the use of nontoxic, innovative treatments that may already exist. For no matter how effective a treatment is, if it can't be patented, no pharmaceutical company is likely to take on the huge expense of marketing it.

The Horwins have written to more than 30 members of Congress about their concerns and they have provided testimony at congressional hearings on government reform. So far, though, to no avail.

They also created a Web site – www.ouralexander.org – to guide other parents. "We stand for the proposition that when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the parents, along with their doctor, should be allowed to make the medical decision in the best interest of the child. It should not be made by an uninformed bureaucrat 3,000 miles away who has no medical information."

Had the FDA been more lenient, Michael and Raphaele Horwin believe, Alexander might be alive today.