She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, but even when she was undergoing radiotherapy she was more concerned about everybody else.
Some researchers have suggested that the radiotherapy destroyed the HIV positive reservoir cells in Brown's body or the transplanted donor cells may have triggered a "graft versus host" reaction, identifying the HIV positive cells as foreign and eliminating them.
But if people had the tools to place the work in context – knowledge of the different phases of clinical trials, for example, an appreciation of the limits of drug therapy (Scowcroft says it's good, old-fashioned surgery and radiotherapy that cures most cancers), we might be able to understand what those mice are really telling us.
"There are some tumours that require radiotherapy to the whole brain and whole spinal cord," said Dr Yen-Ching Chang, a specialist in paediatric radiotherapy and lead on proton beam therapy at University College London hospitals, which will have one of the UK's two machines from 2018.
That has resulted in more than 20,000 patients being forced to wait longer than they should to receive potentially life-saving surgery, cancer drugs or radiotherapy.
The right combination of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy has produced good cure rates – Ashya's doctors at Southampton have said he has a 70-80% chance of recovery.
But the radiotherapy has to be done soon after surgery.
A high court judge subsequently approved the move to take Ashya to Prague for proton beam therapy, which was claimed to be more effective than the conventional radiotherapy offered on the NHS.
Proton beam therapy does not cure any more children than conventional radiotherapy.
The NHS will pay for children with certain specific cancers to have proton beam therapy abroad if it offers benefits over conventional radiotherapy.
In conventional radiotherapy, using photons or x-rays, the radiation carries on travelling beyond the tumour itself and can cause damage to healthy tissue.
