By Stephen S. Hall. Hall, in contrast, comes neither to bury nor to praise his immunologists, and his thoughtful study is all the better for it. Hall spares readers the futile pretense that the great cancer ''magic bullet'' will be there as the new millennium dawns. Medicine is a notoriously messy mix of laboratory research and clinical crisis, the itch for knowledge and the need to act. Different experts contribute diverse skills, and the whole has often been likened to a jigsaw being pieced together by total strangers, each of whom is only guessing at the picture.
Cancer immunotherapy is a particularly good case in point.
Cancer has become the American disease. About 1.4 million new cases occur each year, and a half-million people die of it annually. After a century in which cancer research has received billions of tax dollars and attracted the talents of top scientists, the situation is little less bleak than before. Lung, colon, breast, prostate and other major cancers continue to have appalling fatality rates and hardly better rates of remission than decades ago. Combined assaults from all three might grant extra months or years to many, but proven cures remained the exception.