Searching for Answers

At both the AACR annual meeting in April and the ASCO annual meeting in June, NCI's Harold Varmus spoke about getting scientists to answer the "provocative questions" of cancer research — questions that are complicated and difficult to answer, but which may yield new methods for treatment or prevention of the disease. Recently, NCI unveiled a $17.5 million budget to study these hard questions, reports ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser. The project's Web site lists 24 such questions, culled from a series of workshops held by Varmus, she adds, and they range from asking why more people don't alter behaviors they know might lead to cancer to why certain mutations promote cancer phenotypes in some tissues but not in others.