Let me tell you an amazing story...

In the 1990s, a maverick breast surgeon at @TataMemorial (fresh from his return from the UK) stepped up to do research. Now, to understand the situation, you should go back 30 years, when research was not as big as it is now, and certainly not from surgeons.

Surgeons, and especially cancer surgeons, were renowned for their technical prowess, and their sheer bravado – "wherever the cancer, however advanced, I will take it out". So, our surgeon-researcher was ridiculed for even attempting clinical research

For a surgeon, he couldn’t have chosen a worse topic to research on: early detection; nothing to do with surgery, or even treatment. Remember, this was the 1990s. Cowboy surgery was celebrated, and research ridiculed

Being a breast surgeon, he was troubled with women consistently coming with advanced cancers, and he set out to see if he could work on picking them up at an earlier stage. But community-based early detection needs money, and he just didn’t have it.