From concepts to cures—and back

Richard Nixon was not my favourite President of the United States of America, but he declared his famous War on Cancer while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I was then working in the Department of Medicine in the laboratory of Irving London, who was Head of that department. This was a remarkable privilege for a young scientist: to be a first‐hand witness of the emerging interface between medicine and molecular biology. By 1970, haematology had long been a molecular business and was a specialty in which—for a variety of simple practical reasons—the distance between basic and applied research was very short. But other specialties, of which perhaps virology would be a …