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organization was wrapping up the final session with words meant to inspire, but that the restless audience wasn’t particularly interested in hearing. Watches were checked; bodies slipped out of their seats as surreptitiously as possible and headed for the doors.
    “This has been a remarkably successful meeting,” the president, an overweight oncologist from San Diego, said. “We are truly standing at the threshold of a new dawn in clinical research. The days ahead will be filled with dramatic successes, and disappointing failures. But one thing is certain. Cancer is no longer the mystery it once was. We know more about it, how it works, and how to combat it than ever before. Research into how to stop cancer cells in their tracks—dare I even say cure it?—has never been more promising. We can all go back and report to our patients that the breakthroughsthey read about every day are real. There is reason to hope.”
    “Let’s go,” Goldstein whispered to Mancuso.
    “I want to thank all of you for being here and contributing your knowledge and skills to the meeting. I also wish to thank you for placing your faith in me as your new president and …”
    The closing door behind Goldstein and Mancuso silenced the speaker’s words.
    Traffic on the way to the airport was snarled; they arrived at the gate only minutes before their flight was closed. They settled in adjoining seats, drew deep breaths, looked at each other, and smiled.
    “Ready to go to work?” Goldstein asked.
    “No,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter.”
    They spent a good portion of the flight reviewing notes from the panels and sessions they’d attended by dividing up the duties and reading photocopies of the many papers that had been presented by leading researchers from around the world. The next morning they were due to brief colleagues at the National Institutes of Health on what had transpired during the four days in San Francisco.
    Goldstein and Mancuso landed at Dulles Airport at one-thirty the next morning, Washington time. Later, at 9 A.M. , they sat side by side in a small amphitheater at NIH, on the Rockville Pike in Bethesda, Maryland. A dozen men and women wearing white lab coats faced them from the audience. Their boss, who headed up the cancer research section of NIH, introduced them: “Ron and Barbara have just spent an informative four days in San Francisco at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, and, I trust, four pleasurable days in that wonderful city. I know they have interesting things to report. Barbara, Ron.”
    Goldstein went first; he and Mancuso alternated. They detailed the ongoing research that, in their opinion, had the best chance of advancing the state of cancer care, and cited certain individuals whose work in the field was, in their estimation, superior—Agus in California, Treon at Dana-Farber in Boston, Weber at Houston’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, the team at Wayne State, Sloan-Kettering in New York—they went down the list as quickly as possible, summarizing what had been reported at the conference, adding their own personal evaluation of the work. But no matter how hard they tried to stay within the allotted time, a constant stream of questions interrupted their presentations and pushed the briefing session past the hour they’d been given.
    Dr. Mancuso began the final report, “I know we’re running long and I’ll try to wrap up as quickly as possible. As many of you know, the Cuban research team presented a paper at the meeting. It’s the first time this has happened, and I’m glad tensions have sufficiently thawed between us and Cuba, at least in the medical arena, to allow their researchers and physicians to take part in such meetings.
    “Their team was headed by Dr. Manuel Caldoza. He’s an impressive gentleman who was educated in Canada and Spain, and whose experiments with the use of vanadium to help create broad-spectrum, potent anticancer drugs has been