One of the more amusing aspects of the recent flurry of stories about two promising new cancer treatments is the way researcher Judah Folkman, the son of a rabbi, has been hailed as a secular saint-even though all his miracles, as he's the first to admit, have taken place in mice.

Hardly a week had passed after the now-notorious May 3 front-page story in The New York Times, which described the work of Folkman's lab at Children's Hospital in Boston on endostatin and angiostatin, before Folkman was canonized. As the noted molecular biologist Yogi Berra once observed, "It's dj vu all over again."