Today I’m sitting at my desk in front of an open window through which crisp autumn air and brilliantly warm sunshine pour through simultaneously. The trees have all “gone to glory”, as Abigail Adams once said of the changing leaves in New England. It’s a perfect setting for thinking about the year thus far, the work that’s been accomplished, and the tasks that are yet to be completed before the holidays begin.
I don’t need to wonder what I should write about, for always the same thing comes to mind whenever I open my laptop to begin a new blog: I think about the breast cancer virus and the scientists who have labored so diligently over the years to bring this subject into the light. I am amazed that this all but secret research, which is as mature as ripened fruit, ready for the harvest and just waiting to be picked, is all but ignored.
Sadly, research on the human breast cancer virus – this forbidden fruit – does not hang from a leafy bough on the Tree of Knowledge, but is forced to grow among thorns in the desert. For, you see, those who guard the Tree (Pretorian academics, Nobel Laureates who once looked for the virus but couldn’t find it and, so, decreed its non-existence; e.g. Harold Varmus, the Director of the National Cancer Institute) won’t allow research on the human breast cancer virus into their garden or anywhere near Bethesda.
So forbidden fruit about the breast cancer virus must ripen as best it can, in a desert of ignorance, politics, vanity, and power. And I, a lone voice in the wilderness, cry out, “Who is throwing all these women into the lake?” See below for details.
Investigations that seemed totally irrelevant to any practical objective have yielded most of the major discoveries of medicine. Basic research is the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.
I like the story of the surgeon who, while jogging around a lake, spotted a man drowning. He dove in, dragged the victim ashore, and resuscitated him. He resumed his jogging, only to see another man drowning. After he dragged the second one out and got him breathing, he again wearily resumed his jogging. Soon he saw two more drowning. He also saw a colleague, a professor of biochemistry, nearby, absorbed in thought.
The surgeon called to the scientist to go after one drowning victim while he went after the other. When the biochemist was slow to respond, the surgeon shouted, “Why aren’t you doing something?”
The biochemist responded, “I am doing something. I’m desperately trying to figure out who’s throwing all these people into the lake.”
Arthur Kronberg
“Of Serendipity and Science”
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