Joseph Lipsick Departments of Pathology, Genetics, and Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-5324, USA Correspondence: lipsickstanford.edu

Dysregulation of cell growth and metabolic changes are a feature of tumorigenesis. Studies over the past 50 years have mapped the pathways that control cell growth and metabolism and revealed how these are altered in cancer. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book on the history of cancer research, Joe Lipsick looks at how we got here—from early work on insulin and growth factor receptor signaling to the discovery of phosphatidyl inositol 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase), the identification of mTOR as the target of rapamycin, and the unexpected finding that tumors can produce novel “oncometabolites.”