The boundary between basic science and engineering has been the subject of animated discussions in cancer research for quite some time. Where does science end and engineering begin? Is that boundary porous? How does it shift over time? Today, these questions have gained urgency as the Biden Administration stands poised to spend an additional $6.5 billion by creating Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health within NIH. This amount is roughly equivalent to the NCI budget. (The Cancer Letter, April 9, 2021). The boundary between science and engineering may coincide with the boundary between ARPA-H and NCI, insiders say. What kinds of institutions will it engage as ARPA-H contractors? Will contracts be awarded to academic institutions or to industry? To get a sense of where these discussions may take cancer physicians and scientists, we spoke with Matthew Vander Heiden, an oncologist and cancer researcher who recently became director of the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research (The Cancer Letter, April 2, 2021).
