2625 BC: The Egyptian surgeon Imhotep describes a case of breast cancer. Under "therapy," he lists "there is none."  440 BC: Greek historian Herodotus writes of a Persian queen, Atossa, who underwent perhaps the first mastectomy, when she asked Greek slave to cut out her breast tumor.  400 BC: Hippocrates, the "father of medicine," coins the term "karkinos" crab to describe cancer.  160 AD: Greek scientist Galen proposes that cancer is the result of trapped black bile, a hypothesis that would hold sway until the 17th century.  1761: John Hill publishes Cautions on the Immoderate Use of Snuff, proposing a link between snuff inhaled tobacco and lip cancer.  1775: English surgeon Percival Pott notices a link between chimney sweeping and scrotal cancer.  1778: English doctor John Hunter assigns stages to cancer. For early cancer, he recommends surgery; for late stages, "remote sympathy."  1811: English novelist Fanny Burney undergoes a mastectomy without anesthesia or antisepsis and lives to write about it.  1847: German doctor Rudolf Virchow coins the term "leukemia" to describe an overgrowth of white cells in the blood.  1860: Austrian monk Gregor Mendel discovers genes units of inheritance in pea plants.  1867: English doctor Joseph Lister invents the use of antiseptic methods in surgery.  1890-1900: American surgeon William Halsted invents the "radical" mastectomy, removing not only the breast, but nearby lymph nodes and muscle. Some radical mastectomies even removed bone.  1903: Polish scientist Marie Curie wins the first of two Nobel prizes for her discoveries about radiation.  1913: Berlin surgeon Abraham Salomon uses mammograms to see breast cancer using X-rays.  1915: American Thomas Morgan uses fruit flies to demonstrate that genes are carried on chromosomes  1928: Herman Muller, Morgan's student, uses fruit flies to show that X-rays increase the rate of mutations.  1929: American biochemist Edward Doisy discovers the female hormone estrogen, which will later be found to play a major role in breast cancer.  1940-1945: Saul Hertz, at Massachusetts General Hospital, uses radioactive iodine to kill thyroid cancer cells.  1945: Activist and philanthropist Mary Lasker, the "fairy godmother of medical research," takes over the American Society for Cancer Control, turning it into a fundraising and lobbying machine.  1946: Doctors use variants of mustard gas to kill malignant white cells.  1947-1948: Boston doctor Sidney Farber uses successfully uses chemotherapy on children with leukemia, obtaining brief remissions.  1948-1950: American and British researchers link smoking to lung cancer.  1952-1954: George Papanicolaou finds a way to diagnose cervical cancer, leading the way to screenings that reduce deaths dramatically.  1955: Philip Morris introduces the Marlboro Man, its most successful smoking icon to date, and sales of the brand shoot up by 5,000%.  1963-1968: Americans Paul Carbone and Vince DeVita treat breast cancer with chemotherapy after surgery, increasing survival. DeVita and others go on to cure advanced Hodgkin's disease.  1964: U.S. Surgeon General releases a landmark report on smoking and lung cancer.  1967: British nurse Cicely Saunders founds the first hospice program to care for the terminally ill.  1968: St. Jude's Children's Research Center reports a 60%-to-80% cure rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.  1971: President Nixon launches the "War on Cancer" by signing the National Cancer Act.  1971: Last cigarette commercial is broadcast on TV.  1971: Di-ethyl-stilbestrol, or DES, a drug given to pregnant women to delay preterm delivery, is found to cause uterine cancer in their daughters.  1973: While examining chronic myeloid leukemia cells, American scientist Janet Rowley discovers a new gene created by the fusing of chromosomes 9 and 22. This discovery paves the way for the creation of the drug Gleevec.  1976-1980: American scientists Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus propose that cancer-causing genes are created through the distortion of normal genes found inside cells.  1977: Doctor Bernard Fisher shows that tamoxifen treatment after breast cancer surgery increases survival for women with estrogen-sensitive cancer.  1979-1982: American Robert Weinberg and others isolate cancer-causing genes from cancer cells.  1981: A landmark study shows that radical mastectomy performed on an estimated 500,000 women over the past 90 years, offers no benefit to the less invasive, "simple mastectomy."  1982-1984: Australian researchers Barry Marshall and Robin Warren demonstrate that Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium, causes stomach ulcers and cancer. Marshall helped prove H. pylori's link to ulcers by swallowing a glass of it.  1988: American scientist Bert Vogelstein proposes that cancer cells are created as the result of multiple genetic alterations.  1990: Mary Claire-King identifies a genetic region that confers increased risk for breast cancer. This is eventually found to be the gene BRCA1.  1991 to 2003: Doctors use an unproven and highly toxic combination of high-dose chemotherapy with bone-marrow transplants to treat breast cancer. More than 40,000 patients later, research eventually shows the therapy doesn't save lives.  1998: The Food and Drug Administration approves Herceptin for breast cancer, the first man-made antibody to treat cancer, widely seen as the beginning of the new field of "targeted therapies."  2001: FDA approves Gleevec, a drug based on Rowley's discovery, to treat chronic myeloid leukemia. Gleevec becomes a new ideal in cancer therapy, allowing patients to live symptom-free for years without major side effects.  2003: Scientists complete the Human Genome Project, sequencing all the genes in the human chromosome.  2006-2009: Scientists working on the "cancer genome" sequence nearly all the genes of multiple samples of breast, colon, ovarian and brain cancers.
A blood test so sensitive that it can spot a single cancer cell lurking among a billion healthy ones is moving one step closer to being available at your doctor's office.