In 1971, Judah Folkman, then a 38-year-old surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, proposed a radical idea: tumors in the body send out signals that trick surrounding tissues into helping them grow. The signals instruct these tissues to sprout new blood vessels, which can deliver oxygen and other nutrients to cancer cells. He suggested designing a new kind of drug, one that would block those signals, preventing or destroying the new blood vessel growth and starving tumors.
Cancer at the time was treated mainly by flooding the body with poison (chemotherapy) or searing it with radiation. Folkman’s idea of subtly targeting some mysterious communication channel between tumor and host was met with scorn. When he spoke about his idea at scientific meetings, Folkman said, the room would empty out: “Everybody had to go to the bathroom at once.” One year, the criticism was so intense that Boston Children’s Hospital convened an ...
