PART TWO
 
AN IMPATIENT WAR

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

—Franz Kafka

The 325,000 patients with cancer who are going to die this year cannot wait; nor is it necessary, in order to make great progress in the cure of cancer, for us to have the full solution of all the problems of basic research . . . the history of Medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism of action was understood for these cures.

—Sidney Farber

Why don’t we try to conquer cancer by America’s 200th birthday? What a holiday that would be!

—Advertisement published in
the New York Times by the Laskerites,
December 1969