It's one of the dilemmas in cancer vaccines. As these are shown to be safe, trials are being done in less difficult situations.

These trials may be doomed to fail.

This is a rapidly evolving field, and it's bringing a lot of different disciplines together. Unlike drugs or radiation, which are given to the patient, do their damage, and leave, what we're doing is asking the patient's own immune system to mount an attack on the cancer. It's very, very different from standard chemotherapy.

The trials have so far yielded excellent preliminary indications and will be followed by trials on animals with cancer.

The hundreds and hundreds of African-American women participating in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study made this discovery possible. Their willingness to take part in this outstanding population-based study and contribute DNA for genetic analysis is a remarkable legacy.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004.