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RON DEPINHO is a man on a mission. Oddly, though, he does not yet know exactly what that mission is. Dr DePinho is the new president of the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas. (He took over in September, having previously headed the Belfer Institute, part of Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.) Mindful of his adopted city's most famous scientific role, as home to Mission Control for the Apollo project, he says his own mission is akin to a moon shot. He aims to cure not one but five varieties of cancer. What he has not yet decided is: which five? 罗恩•徳平厚肩负着一个使命。虽然奇怪的是，他现在仍不清楚他的使命的确切目标是什么。徳平厚博士是德克萨斯州休斯顿市的MD •安德森癌症研究中心的新任主任，他此前是哈佛的丹娜-法波尔癌症研究院下属的贝尔佛研究所所长。徳平厚知道，休斯顿在科学领域最广为人知的，是其作为阿波罗登月计划的目标控制中心所在地。因此，他说他自己的目标也类似于登月。这就是，要找到攻克不仅一种，而是五种癌症的方法。他现在还没有决定的是哪五种癌症。 That it is possible to talk of curing even one sort of cancer is largely thanks to an outfit called the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Researchers belonging to this group, which involves 39 projects in four continents, are using high-throughput DNA-sequencing to examine 50 sorts of tumour. They are comparing the mutations in many examples of each type, to find which are common to a type (and thus, presumably, causative) and which are mere accidents. (The DNA-repair apparatus in malignant cells often goes wrong, so such accidents are common.) | 
