The Hope & The Hype

Unless you have gone through the experience yourself, or watched a loved one's struggle, you really have no idea just how desperate cancer can make you. You pray, you rage, you bargain with God, but most of all you clutch at any hope, no matter how remote, of a second chance at life.

For a few heady days last week, however, it seemed as if the whole world was a cancer patient and that all humankind had been granted a reprieve. Triggered by a front-page medical news story in the usually reserved New York Times, all anybody was talking about--on the...