cells and watch the wheels go round. We have, in the process, uncovered the most amazing array of signaling systems that normal cells use to talk to each other. They mostly involve the cancer genes, called oncogenes .
When these systems, or genes, are damaged, by an accident of nature, deficiencies in our diet, cigarette smoke or environmental agents, the cells can still talk to each other but they often cannot hear. The result is that the programs once used to carefully control growth and development of an egg to a fetus or a child to an adult have no brakes, and the wild and destructive growth that emerges is cancer. One of the reasons why understanding the cancer process well is so important is that it is the very stuff of life itself. Understanding this process has important implications for human development and particularly the aging process, the last frontier of medicine.
In medicine we make progress by a process of trial and error even when we do not understand what we are doing. But we make much more progress when we understand things, and we are now at a level of understanding of the cancer process that was unforeseen by even the most optimistic of scientists in 1971, when the U.S. Congress passed the National Cancer Act that poured billions of dollars into cancer research. Yet the fruits of this investment in basic understanding of cancer are just now reaching the level of clinical application and are hardly measurable yet in national statistics.
Improved Techniques We also continue to use and improve the old ways— surgery, radiotherapy , chemotherapy and biotherapy. These older ways have been aptly described by the author Lewis Thomas as "halfway technologies." When the Cancer Act was passed in the U.S.A., a concerted effort was made to improve
