The article uses Synta Pharmaceuticals as a case study.
Clearly, Gladwell appreciates the crudeness of extant cancer therapeutics and the difficulty of discovering new ones. My own reaction to his fine article is that we know a lot more about biology and cancer than we did even a few years ago, and we can't let ourselves get discouraged. We have to keep putting resources into basic research. And even though the classic venture capital model is broken, we have to find some way to keep financing small biotech companies like Synta (which is now publicly traded).
