Mina Bissell is Distinguished Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which she joined in 1972. Bissell writes about the ecology of tumors on page 30 with Berkeley colleagues Paraic Kenny and Celeste Nelson. Bissell was first intrigued by how cells - particularly cancer cells - preserve their identities in vivo, since "you put them in a dish... and they forget where they came from." "The tumors are not an island," she says. "We need to be treating cancer as the problem of the organism... by changing the microenvironment and the signals that the cells receive."












