But Dr. Jerome Groopman, a cancer researcher at the Harvard Medical School, was wary. But a sober scientist waits for the data. And until the drugs are given to humans, he said, the crucial data simply do not exist. So far, the drugs are the only ones ever tested that can seemingly eradicate all tumors in mice, even gigantic ones, equivalent to a two-pound growth in a person. The best that other cancer drugs have done is slow the growth of these large tumors.
Mice are the traditional test animals in cancer research.
But even the drugs' discoverer, Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher at Children's Hospital in Boston, is cautious about the drugs' promise. Until patients take them, he said, it is dangerous to make predictions. Other scientists are not so restrained. Dr. Watson said Dr. Folkman would be remembered along with scientists like Charles Darwin as someone who permanently altered civilization. If he could block a tumor's blood supply, he reasoned, the tumor should shrink to a minuscule size.