For nearly a decade, practicing cancer medicine had become like living inside a pressurized can—pushed, on one hand, by the increasing force of biological clarity about cancer, but then pressed against the wall of medical stagnation that seemed to have produced no real medicines out of this biological clarity. In the winter of 1945, Vannevar Bush had written to President Roosevelt, “The striking advances in medicine during the war have been possible only because we had a large backlog of scientific data accumulated through basic research in many scientific fields in the years before the war.”
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