 Highbridge Company presents The Philadelphia Chromosome, by Jessica Wopner, read by Heather Henderson. Original material copyright 2013 Jessica Wopner. Recording copyright 2013 Highbridge Company and recorded by arrangement with The Experiment LLC. Authors Note This book draws extensively from interviews I conducted with those who lived this story. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes herein are from those interviews which took place in 2012 or, in the case of a few scientists, 2007, where quotes are taken from other material the original source is noted. Jessica Wopner Forward by Robert A. Weinberg, Ph.D. A widespread illusion is that cancer is a disease of modernity, an artifact of pollution and bad diet and myriad other factors associated with a modern lifestyle. The truth is quite different. The disease of cancer threatens all multicellular life with greater or lesser frequency. In the case of our own species, cancer incidence has exploded because we now live long enough to develop a disease, much like Alzheimer's, that largely strikes the aged. Until recently we did not know how and why the disease arose, and yet in spite of this we developed the means to treat some, but hardly all, forms of the disease. The use of chemotherapy and radiation has had a remarkable effect in treating some cancers, and almost no effect on others. By the early 1970s, however, it was already clear that these cytotoxic therapies had yielded almost as much benefit as they possibly could, that is, they had exhausted their potential for making major inroads into reducing cancer-associated mortality. Those looking over the scientific horizon concluded that new ways of treating the disease were required. The thinking of those interested in such innovations in cancer treatment focused on how the disease was being caused. If only one could understand the defects within cancer cells they reasoned, novel ways of treating the disease would surely emerge. This article of faith gained currency with the discoveries in the second half of the 1970s that distinct cancer-causing genes could be found within cancer cells. The genes, soon called oncogenes, appeared to be the motive forces behind the runaway proliferation of many types of human cancer cells. By attacking these genes, and more specifically the proteins that they produced, highly targeted, extremely effective therapies could be developed, or so the thinking went. The proponents of this new approach to dealing with cancer portrayed their strategy as a means of developing sample complete. Ready to continue?