Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.

THE National Cancer Institute, which has overseen American efforts on researching and combating cancers since 1971, should take on an ambitious new goal for the next decade: the development of new drugs that will provide lifelong cures for many, if not all, major cancers. Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics.

This was not the case when President Richard Nixon and Congress declared a “war on cancer” more than 35 years ago. As a member of the new National Cancer Advisory Board, I argued that money for “pure cancer research” would be a more prudent expenditure of federal funds than creating new clinical cancer centers. My words, however, fell on deaf ears, and the institute took on a clinical mission. My reward for openly disagreeing was being kicked off the advisory board after only two years.

While overall cancer death rates in the United States began to decrease slowly in the 1990s, cancer continues to take an appalling toll, claiming nearly 560,000 lives in 2006, some 200,000 more fatalities than in the year before the War on Cancer began. Any claim that we are still “at war” elicits painful sarcasm. Hardly anyone I know works on Sunday or even much on Saturday, as almost no one believes that his or her current work will soon lead to a big cure.

A comprehensive overview of how cancer works did not begin to emerge until about 2000, with more extensive details about specific cancers beginning to pour forth only after the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project (a breathtaking achievement that the Italian-born virologist and Nobel laureate Renato Dulbecco foresaw in 1985 as a necessary prerequisite for a deep understanding of cancer). We shall soon know all the genetic changes that underlie the major cancers that plague us. We already know most, if not all, of the major pathways through which cancer-inducing signals move through cells. Some 20 signal-blocking drugs are now in clinical testing after first being shown to block cancer in mice. A few, such as Herceptin and Tarceva, have Food and Drug Administration approval and are in widespread use.