New Research

Ran across this blurb for an interesting book: Dr Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer by Robert Cooke

Dr. Folkman's radical new way of thinking about cancer was once considered preposterous. So little was known about how cancer spreads and how blood vessels grow that he wasn't even taken seriously enough to be considered a heretic. Now, though, the overwhelming majority of experts believes that the day will soon come when antiangiogenesis therapy supplants the current more toxic and less-effective treatments — chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery-as the preferred method of treatment for cancer in patients around the world, and Dr. Folkman's breakthrough will come to be taken for granted the way we now take for granted the polio vaccine and antibiotics. Dr. Folkman's War brilliantly describes how high the odds are against success in medical research, how vicious the competition for grants, how entrenched the skepticism about any genuinely original thinking, how polluted by politics and commerce is the process of getting medicine into patients' hands.

If it is hard to fund and research cancer cures, imagine the plight of schizophrenics who have a disease that is shoved into the back of the closet.