The Gompertzian view: Norton honored for role in establishing cancer treatment approach.

Larry Norton’s multidimensional views of the world have come in handy for decades. As a child, he was rewarded by an art teacher for drawing objects from multiple vantage points. As a college student, he discovered a mistake in the tertiary structure of a chemical portrayed in a standard organic chemistry textbook. And as a clinical oncologist, he used mathematical models of tumor growth to create a new approach for treating breast cancer with drugs. For this, Norton—now deputy physician-in-chief for breast cancer programs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York—was awarded this year’s David A. Karnofsky award, the highest honor given annually by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The award was sweet vindication for Norton and his efforts to advance an unpopular and poorly funded topic: the application of mathematical concepts to cancer biology. Most scientists in this area have gone “underground,” Norton said, to work through informal collaborations with little or no financial backing. Why? “Because biology and medicine tend to attract researchers who don’t think in mathematical ways,” explained Richard Simon, D.Sc., head of the National Cancer Institute’s Biometric Research Branch and one of Norton’s earliest collaborators. “There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part it’s unusual for [cancer researchers] to put empirical observations into theories and then use those theories to develop testable hypotheses.”