The First Step And The Last Mile

By Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy

I attended the Spring Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York City earlier this month.  The catch phrase was “the last mile”; that is, how difficult it is to complete the last leg of a project – the last mile being the most difficult and hazardous.  The general consensus at CGI was that global commitments to change the world, though well intentioned and well designed, don’t falter at the first step but on the last mile.  I have to agree, at this point the last mile for research on the breast cancer virus certainly seems to be a face too steep to scale: funding for Dr. Pogo’s lab – she’s the one who found evidence of the human mammary tumor virus in approximately 40% of breast cancer specimens she examined in 1995 – will completely run out in a matter of months.  Then what?  Who will continue this research?  No one here in the United States it seems.  Caroline Ford is making good progress, in Australia.  Others are plodding along, in Austria.  Dr. James Lawson is still in the game, in New South Wales. But apparently no organization, philanthropic or governmental, here in the great United States is willing to trudge through to the end, completing the research whose first step was begun in 1936 at Jackson Memorial Laboratory by Dr. John Bittner who discovered a breast cancer virus in mice and who, thereafter, thought that a similar agent might be responsible for the same disease in women.  He died in 1956, having been nominated for the Nobel Prize twice.  It remained for others like Pogo to continue his research.  And now the last mile, the final step toward proof that the human mammary tumor virus causes breast cancer in women, appears impossible to traverse for lack of leadership, vision, courage, and commitment.  Oh, that tricky last mile. What can be done that we may carry on?

In February, the remains of England’s King Richard III were found beneath the rubble of a Leicester parking lot.  The 500-year old bones were of the last Plantagenet King, killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  I sincerely hope that research on the human mammary tumor virus does not suffer the same humiliating fate, plunged into obscurity and paved over in the name of progress.  Only time will tell.