But the discovery had to come from the bottom up—from the cancer cell to its therapy. “As the decade ended,” Bruce Chabner781, former director of the NCI’s Division of Cancer Treatment, recalled, “it was as if the whole discipline of oncology, both prevention and cure, had bumped up against a fundamental limitation of knowledge. We were trying to combat cancer without understanding the cancer cell, which was like launching rockets without understanding the internal combustion engine.”
