The life of Judah Folkman took an unexpected turn one morning in
May 1998. That day, a front-page article in the New York Times
announced that Folkman, a professor at the Harvard Medical
School in Boston, had discovered two natural compounds,
angiostatin and endostatin, that dramatically shrunk tumors in
mice by cutting the cancer¿s blood supply. Along the story was a
quote from Nobel laureate James Watson: "Judah is going to cure
cancer in two years." Watson eventually backed off, but the
media frenzy had already exploded worldwide, transforming
Folkman into a reluctant hero in the fight against cancer.
Folkman's reputation in the medical world was well established
long before he hit the headlines. The son of a rabbi, he was a
student when he developed the first implantable atrio-
ventricular pacemaker in the 1950s. Later, he pioneered the
first implantable polymers to obtain slow drug releasing. At the
age of 34, when he became the youngest professor of surgery to
be hired at the Harvard Medical School, he w