Ned Sharpless is director of the National Cancer Institute.

So when President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act in 1971, the thinking was that

we'd be able to give the president a cure for cancer by the bicentennial in 1976.

Thus began the so-called war on cancer.

It was supposed to be a short war.

There had been this really amazing success against pediatric leukemia in the late 50s and

60s.

So the thinking was, well, if you can cure leukemia like that, we're just going to do the

rest of cancer.

But that didn't happen.

Why didn't that happen?

Well, it gets this difference between science and engineering.

The engineer sees a problem and we can build a rocket in 10 years and we're going to go

to the moon.

It was sort of that thinking that cancer is a problem and we need to develop a treatment

and we're going to devote a lot of resources to it.

But what we had to do really and are still doing today, frankly, was decades of intricate

basic science to really understand the basic biology of cancer.

Basic science and basic biology, perhaps.

But overall, cancer has turned out to be incredibly complicated.

When I started in this business in the 1990s, we thought of cancer as like a couple of

diseases.

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