ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
It’s happened every spring for the last seven years: our annual issue dedicated to cancer research more or less coincides with the opening of the major-league baseball season. A recent New York Times article about revising the game to make it move faster (and hence be less boring) got me thinking about whether changing the rules governing this American pastime is an apt metaphor for what’s now happening in cancer research.
The Oscar-nominated 1949 film It Happens Every Spring about a baseball nobody can hit also seems to contain a metaphorical nugget. The ball flies through a window into the laboratory of one Professor Simpson, where it acquires the ability to repel wood after a dunking in “methylethylpropylbutyl.” Using the ball, Simpson goes on to ...
