To Our Readers

By WALTER ISAACSON/MANAGING EDITOR

Last week's cascade of stories about drugs that can knock out cancer in mice sent patient hopes (and stock prices) soaring. But it also presented the type of challenge that is particularly important in covering potential medical breakthroughs, especially ones in which "cure" and "cancer" appear in the same sentence. "We were seeing a disturbing disconnect between the headlines and the actual science," says science editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt, whose staff was already reporting a cover on cancer. "We thought we could separate the hope from the hype with some expert explaining."

The job of assessing the drugs that made last week's headlines fell to our medical writer Christine Gorman, who has been tracking anti-angiogenic drugs since she first wrote about them for TIME in 1995. Her interest in research dates back to a college summer job she had in a medical lab. The solitude of lab work was not for her, so she traded in her lab coat for a reporter's notebook.

Our story about the emerging gene-based treatments was written by Claudia Wallis, who was a TIME science editor from 1989 to 1994 and is now managing editor of TIME FOR KIDS. Wallis picked up where she left off on the science beat to write about new gene-based treatments. "When I was a medical writer in the 1980s, cancer genes were just being discovered and understood. Now we are seeing that these discoveries may pay off for patients," says Wallis, who wrote our 1991 cover on breast cancer. "It's very exciting."

Looking back at TIME's extensive coverage of cancer helped me put this hope and frustration into perspective. In 1949 we did a cover on cancer fighter Cornelius Rhoads, whose Sloan-Kettering Institute had tested 1,500 chemicals on mice in hopes of finding "chemotherapy" treatments. In a cover 10 years later, we predicted that "drug treatment will emerge as the equivalent of surgery and radiation," and quoted the National Cancer Institute's John Heller as saying, "I'm confident that we will have some success in the next few years."

It has been 40 more years. In writing the cover, Gorman says she tried "to step back, take a deep breath and be really clear about what has and hasn't happened." Both aspects are amazing.