Science's EiC Once More Champion's Basic Research - This Time as a Practical Imperative. (April 4, 2008)

In last week's editorial in Science its editor in chief, Bruce Alberts, made a strong pitch for the support of basic research saying in part that the public and the Congress in the United States, including many of the most effective advocates for increased public funding of the biomedical sciences, appear largely unaware of the understanding of  only a small fraction of what is needed to understand even the simplest bacterial cell let alone trying to come to grips with multicellularity, or of the need to remove that lack of knowledge in order to intervene effectively in most human diseases.

This week he sites two specific instances where gaining a fundamental understanding is essential to developing curative weapons to fight cancer: 1) the mechanisms controlling prescribed cell death (apoptosis) and 2) determining why the cells in a particular individual tumour are genetically unstable (for example, which DNA repair protein has been altered during the evolution of that tumour).

Professor Alberts concludes:

These examples of rational approaches to cancer therapy were only a dream until recently. But by targeting these types of alterations in cancer cells, researchers have made impressive progress and are thus much closer to being able to design highly selective therapies based on the critical molecular defects in an individual tumor. But for most tumors, this type of approach is still hit or miss, because oncologists are severely hampered by an inadequate understanding of the fundamental processes that are altered in a particular tumor. My conclusion: If I were the czar of cancer research, I would give a higher priority to recruiting more of our best young scientists to decipher the detailed mechanisms of both apoptosis and DNA repair, and I would give them the resources to do so.