Old Ideas Spur New Approaches in Cancer Fight

The New York Times

Mina Bissell will never forget the reception she got from a prominent scientist visiting Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she worked. She gave him a paper she had just published on the genesis of cancer.

“He took the paper and held it over the wastebasket and said, ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Then he dropped it in.”

That was 20 years ago, and ever since, Dr. Bissell and a few others have struggled for acceptance of what seemed a radical idea: Gene mutations are part of the process of cancer, but mutations alone are not enough. Cancer involves an interaction between rogue cells and surrounding tissue... read more