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This was despite the fact that the experiment with barnyard fowl had been repeated successfully on several more occasions, and a virus found
each time. ‘Not until after some 15 years of disputation amongst oncologists were the findings with chickens deemed valid – and then they were relegated to a category distinct from that
of mammals because from them no viruses could be obtained.’
    In the event, Rous’s work with chicken viruses was to spawn one of the most exciting and productive fields ever in cancer research. But he died in 1970, just too early tosee it truly bear fruit. ‘Tumours are the most concrete and formidable of human maladies, yet despite more than 70 years of experimental study they remain the least
understood,’ he told his Nobel audience, musing a little later, ‘We term the lawless cells neoplastic because they form new tissue, and the growth itself a neoplasm; but on looking into
medical dictionaries, hoping for more information, we are told, in effect, that
neoplastic
means “of or pertaining to a neoplasm”, and turning to
neoplasm
learn that
it is “a growth which consists of neoplastic cells”. Ignorance could scarcely be more stark.’
    After experiencing the same failure as others to repeat his chicken results with rats and mice, Rous quit virus research for more obviously rewarding fields of pathology. It fell to others to
tease out what Rous sarcoma virus, RSV, as it had been named, was doing in cells to make them malignant, and to see what lessons this might hold for understanding the mechanics of cancer in
humans.
    A DISEASE OF THE GENES?
    Notable among these others are Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus who, working together at the University of California at San Francisco in the early 1970s, made such momentous
discoveries with RSV that they too won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, in 1989. Bishop had begun work with the virus in 1968, just two years after Rous’s Nobel award, and says of that event
that it ‘dramatised the great mystery of how RSV might cause cancer. It was a mystery whose solution lay in genetics.’
    This was an assessment shared by Varmus, then doing postgraduate training in medical research on the other side of the country at the National Institutes of Health, NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland.
Varmus had become excited at the potential for approaching the mind-boggling complexity of human genetics – particularly in relation to disease – throughthe
study of much simpler organisms. ‘From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumours in animals to understand that they might
provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer,’ he wrote in his autobiographical account of his work. ‘In fact, for anyone interested in the genetic basis of
cancer, viruses seemed to be the only game in town.’ The little scraps of life contain around five to ten genes all told, compared with 20,500 or so in our cells.
    In the summer of 1969, Varmus and his journalist wife Connie combined a backpacking trip to California with the search for opportunities to study viruses on the West Coast. Visiting Mike Bishop
in his lab at UCSF, he found a fellow book addict with wide tastes in literature, and a keen writer also. Bishop, too, had been ambivalent about becoming a doctor, but had discovered almost by
chance the thrill of laboratory science and not looked back. In Bishop, Varmus had discovered a kindred spirit and he agreed to join him the following year. ‘Harold’s arrival changed my
life and career,’ Bishop recalled during his Nobel address. ‘Our relationship evolved rapidly to one of co-equals and the result was surely greater than the sum of the two
parts.’
    When they started their work together the two scientists were somewhat out on a limb, for in 1970 many of their peers were still sceptical, even frankly disbelieving, of the theory that cancer
is a disease of the genes, since