The epic battle with cancer's 'Death Star'

Forty years after the mutant genes that cause the deadliest cancers were discovered, drugs that target them could be approvedIn the early 1980s, Channing Der was just beginning his career as a scientist at Harvard Medical School when he happened upon a discovery that would change the course of cancer research. At the time, the holy grail of cancer biology was discovering so-called oncogenes – genetic switches that can turn a normal cell into a cancer cell – in the genomes of tumours.