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But you know, you realize now that people are being given combinations of drugs, just by gosh and by golly, and that doesn't mean at all necessarily that you or I might easily have the type of tumor that didn't happen to respond with those particular drugs. (cross talk)

And there is an awful lot of unnecessary suffering, isn't there?

There is an awful lot of unnecessary suffering and toxicity that is really incredible, incredibly unscientific.

As you know with antibiotics, people know so much now that they just get one antibiotic or another, but usually people, if they have a severe infection of some kind, before they give you an antibiotic they take a blook sample and in three or four days they can grow out the bacteria and see if you've got some bizarre infection that doesn't respond to penicillin or to some other well known antibiotic, and then you can be given precisely what it does respond to. But usually they've got such a broad spectrum of antibiotics that they know pretty well what will work.

But in cancer we've never had any way to test which drugs will work on what. It's just been done empirically.

But isn't there a certain amount of optimism about it?