They fought and learned, wheedled and screamed, and seldom gave up. Many gave freely with a seemingly endless amount of time, energy, and enthusiasm. All with no pay, no gratitude, and no authority, in the face of a lot of bad studies, wasted money, and useless or disappointing results. Too many have literally died in the process. CABs today are often very different.
Some cities have enough CABs to keep an activist out of the bars every weeknight.
A great deal of the business of CABs is bureaucratic, dreary and difficult to understand. Often we find out about important decisions or trials after they've gone down the wrong path, or discover that individual investigators have little to say about what happens in the national networks, or if they do have power patronize us in any one of a hundred ways. The government programs have changed too. A new generation of Cabbies has arisen, well-meaning individuals who don't have the fire in their guts and who need to be trained from scratch about the research process and their role in it. They aren't self-taught or as tenacious in their desire to influence change.