学术英语课后答案 unit2(7)

The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. And I think that’s been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. The goal is to control cancer. And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us.

I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, “We’ve made a mistake. We have all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. We need to take a step back.” And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. People got upset, but this is the only way we’re going to go forward.

You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. I said, “Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers?” And he was saying, “Does he really want to meet another doctor?” But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it’s been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling—and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team—the modeling of cancer in the body as a complex system. And I’ll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it.

The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, “What was the average temperature?” and it came back at 98.7, I would say, “Great.” But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I