I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D.
Our biggest single theme is trying to make the NIH work better with the same amount of money.
I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.
Some growths can be detected early, making for increased accuracy in diagnosis. Some can be cured and others controlled.
In the 1960s and '70s, there wasn't much evidence at all. We knew vaguely the causes of cancer, but methods like genomics were very new.
Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice.
In general, all cancers have been traditionally characterized by the way they appear under the microscope and the organs in which they arise.
Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.
I believe that we are going to have a much deeper appreciation of what kinds of abnormalities in cancer cells and in the surrounding cells that feed and respond to cancers are vulnerabilities that will allow us to make better predictions of which kinds of drugs will work to treat these cancers.
