For more than 100 years, doctors and scientists had formulated dozens of theories about what triggered the disease, but in 1971 they were still just that, unproven theories. Scientists knew there was a killer, but how and why it killed was as big a mystery as ever.

The seriousness of a national quest for a cure lent new urgency to those conducting basic research into the causes of cancer. If the roots of cancer could be found, if doctors finally understood what made the cancer engine run, then perhaps there would be new, unimagined ways to attack the disease and turn the engine off.
 
Bert Vogelstein, MD, lead investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Johns Hopkins University, remembers how frustrating those years were. One of his first patients was a very young girl suffering from a brain tumor. The attempt to explain to the girl?s frightened parents what was happening was a formative experience.
 
"It was so mysterious, like something from outer space. You had no idea, none, about what was going on," Dr. Vogelstein said. "It seemed to me to be a good way to spend your life, finding the cause so you could be a little optimistic."

The challenge was complex. The treatments doctors used most when cancer was detected, radiation and drugs, were effective but indiscriminate. They killed and maimed healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Also, scientists who wanted to join the fight against cancer had to choose which of the many suspected causes of cancer to investigate. Nobody had the time or resources to pursue all the theories. After much study, the theory most appealing to Dr. Vogelstein was that genes were the problem.

This theory wasn?t new. It had been around for almost 100 years. But now there were new tools available to study genes. Dr. Vogelstein, like dozens of other scientists around the world conducting basic research into cancer, became a kind of detective, searching for one of the deadliest and most elusive killers in history.

Early in his career, Dr. Vogelstein received funding from the American Cancer Society (ACS) to support his promising, but as yet untested , ideas. "Such start-up funds were critical to our efforts to initiate a successful laboratory program, and I doubt whether any similar funds were available then (or now)," Dr. Vogelstein wrote in a letter to the Society. "Based on my own personal experience, as well as that of others in the last decade, I believe that these ACS programs are uniquely important for furthering the careers of young investigators at a crucial time in their maturation."

In addition, Dr. Vogelstein was an ACS Research Professor, the Society's highest award, from 1993 to 1995, until he became a senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also received the ACS's Medal of Honor in 1992.

Next in the series: A Painstaking Search for a Genetic Cause