The main criterion for an award (of a research contract from the NCI) is the capacity to demonstrate the relevance of the project to the program's target. But the only sure way to prove this relevance is to have, in fact, already proved it.

Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction.

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. Doctors treat diseases but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.