Dr. Folkman's war: angiogenesis and the struggle to defeat cancer by Robert C. Cooke

✍ Scribed by William C. Lineaweaver; M.D.

• Book ID: 102513870
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 49 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0738-1085
• DOI: 10.1002/micr.21738

✦ Synopsis

Despite its overly dramatic title, this book is a generally sober, clear, and cleanly written narrative account of Dr. Folkman's career-long work to establish angiogenesis as a central concept in oncology.

The book illustrates a remarkable problem in science. If an individual conceives of a radically different concept within an area of science, how does that individual introduce the concept into the mainstream of thought and work? The problems are manyfold. The concept must be clearly articulated. Descriptive and experimental demonstration must be completed. Presentation and publication must be convincingly submitted to juries and audiences, and the ramifications of the novel elements must be worked out in areas of concepts, research, and application. All of these efforts are made in the face of established ideas and practices that must be changed or overthrown completely. Results, confirmation, and unexpected developments must be scrutinized. The individual with the idea has to endure frustration, failure, criticism of all sorts, and all the real uncertainties of innovation.

For an individual physician who, during a cocktail hour at a refresher course at a ski resort, envisions a radically different cancer treatment, the obstacles to developing the idea appear overwhelming. To the talented young academic surgeon awarded a precociously high position at a prestigious institution, the prospects apparently are not much better.