Judah Folkman died on Monday. If you are like me and you have never heard of the man before you can read his his New York Times obituary here. But what I found to be really interesting is this interview at Academy of Achievement. The first part of the interview is nothing special. Just the typical biographical stuff. But once you get to this point it gets pretty interesting. Here is how the real meat of the interview starts….

The obstacles mainly were in the very beginning, in the late ’60s, when we proposed the idea that tumors need to recruit their own private blood supply. That was met with almost universal hostility and ridicule and disbelief by other scientists. Because the dogma at that time was that tumors did not need to stimulate new blood vessels, they just grew on old ones. And that even if they could, after we showed it, the next disbelief was it didn’t make any difference; it was a side effect like pus in a wound. So if you said you were studying wound healing and you found pus, they said you were studying a side effect, it’s not important. And then after we showed it was important, which took us about five years (and we said there would be specific signals, molecules that would stimulate this, everyone said — pathologists, surgeons, basic scientists — said, “No, that’s non-specific inflammation. You’re studying dirt.” They used to say, “You’re studying dirt. There will be no such molecules.” And then when we actually proved that there was — that was now 1983 (starting in the late ’60s), we had the first molecule. They said, “Well, but you’ll never prove that that’s what tumors use.” So it was each step.

H/T In the Pipeline