However, from his own work and observation of Folkman's work, Ingber says he believes in the end angiogenesis inhibitors will help in the management of cancer and other disorders.

"I am a firm believer that cancer will not be cured per se,"he says. "Rather it will be managed much like we now manage tuberculosis or diabetes. In sum, if [anti-angiogenesis therapy] is not a cure it will break the back of the disease."

Folkman also says that angiogenesis research may offer a broad range of potential benefits, pointing out that cancer patients are not the only people who stand to gain from anti-angiogenesis work.

"A lot of diseases turn on angiogenesis and don't turn it off," he says. "Arthritis, where vessels grow on the joints; blindness in diabetics; endometriosis, where there's bleeding in the abdomen from the lining of the uterus gone up the tube."

Drugs like endostatin could make very useful and effective treatments for these diseases since, as Folkman says, they are "very safe, like insulin, but also potent."

The lightning speed at which work on angiogenesis has progressed, as well as the immense promise his and his colleagues' research holds for the future of medicine, prompted Folkman to make an analogy to another technological feat no one had thought possible.

"It's sort of like the Wright Brothers," he says. "When they took off on their first flight, it only took 12 seconds."

But what followed proves beyond a doubt that the seemingly impossible--be it human flight or the management of incurable diseases--may sometimes be achieved through passion and dedication, two attributes Folkman has in spades.