The Lifetime Network TV movie Living Proof, premiering tomorrow at 9 p.m. EDT, tells the true story of UCLA genetics researcher Dr. Dennis Slamon, whose work led to development of the cancer treatment Herceptin, which has shown great success in recent years in killing cancers without causing the damaging side effects common in chemotherapy.

Herceptin works differently from chemo, which is a poison that kills human cells, with the treatment based on the hope that the drugs will destroy cancer cells without doing excessive harm to the rest of the body. It’s a hope for people with cancer, but a less damaging alternative would be greatly welcome.

That’s what Herceptin is: a "superprotein" that can "target the bad cells and turn them off like a light switch. It won’t cure the cancer, but it’ll shut it off, which is almost as good," as Sloman states it in the film. The superprotein does no harm to normal cells, thus avoiding side effects.

The film shows Sloman, played by Harry Connick Jr., going through a decade of clinical trials and losing patience as thousands of women die of breast cancer while the treatment awaits approval by the federal government’s Food and Drug Administration, as the makers of the drug negotiate their way through an elaborate bureaucratic process intended to make sure the drug will not harm anyone.

The happy ending comes in 1998, when the drug finally receives FDA approval, which the film notes, means "hundreds of thousands of women are alive today" who would have been killed by cancer otherwise.

Despite the final triumph, however, there is a tragic lesson to be learned: because of the entirely unnecessary intervention of government into doctor-patient relationships—which is what the "drug approval" process is—thousands of women endured awful pain and discomfort which was absolutely unnecessary, because they were denied a drug that could have saved their lives painlessly.

That’s the real lesson to be found in Living Proof.