Not Good News on Cancer  One of the first ideas people had when
attempting to come up with a drug treatment for cancer was to
discover what was different between a normal and a diseased
cell. This seemingly smart idea was totally stymied because at
the molecular level a cancer cell is bafflingly complex with
scads of measurable differences compared to its healthy
counterpart. The result is that most of the effective
therapeutic agents are nonspecific toxins with lots of side
effects.  The modern solution to this problem is to design drugs
that ferret out the “critical lesion” among the many biochemical
changes observed in a neoplastic cell. Hence, Gleevec, Erbitux,
Herceptin and a few other new drugs that target essential growth
pathways gone haywire in cancer. These can be very effective in
patients whose cancer contains the altered target, but this is
not all patients and even for the “lucky” ones, the specter of
acquired drug resistance is ever present.  And now comes worse
news. A large collaboration invo