Scientists have known for more than two decades that cancer is a disease of the genes. Something scrambles the DNA inside a nucleus, and suddenly, instead of dividing in a measured fashion, a cell begins to copy itself furiously. Unlike an ordinary cell, it never, stops. But describing the process isn’t the same as figuring it out. Cancer cells are so radically different from normal ones that it’s almost impossible to untangle the sequence of events that made them that way. So for years researchers have been attacking the problem by taking normal cells and trying to determine what changes will turn them cancerous - always Without success. According to a report in the current issue of Nature, a team of scientists based at M. I .T.’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has finally managed to make human ceils malignant -a feat they accomplished with two different cell types by inserting just three altered genes into their DNA. While these manipulations were done only in lab dishes and won’t lead to any immediate treatment, they appear to be a crucial step in understanding the disease. This is a "landmark paper," wrote Jonathan Weitzman and Moshe Yaniv of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in an accompanying commentary. The dramatic new result traces back to a breakthrough in 1983, when the Whitehead’s Robert Weinberg and colleagues showed that mouse cells would become cancerous when subjected to two altered genes. But when they tried such alterations on human cells, they didn’t work. Since then, scientists have learned that mouse cells differ from human cells in an important respect: they have higher levels of an enzyme called telomerase. That enzyme keeps caplike structures called telomeres on the ends of chromosomes from getting shorter with each round of cell division. Such shortening is part of a cell’s aging process, and since cancer cells keep dividing forever, the Whitehead group reasoned that making human cells more mouselike might also make them cancerous. The strategy worked. The scientists took connective-tissue and kidney cells and introduce three altered genes—one that makes cells divide rapidly; another that disables two substances meant to rein in excessive division; and a third that promotes the production of telomerase, which made the cells essentially immortal. They’d created a tumor in a test tube. "Some people believed that telomerase wasn’t that important," says the Whitehead’s William Hahn, the study’s lead author. "This allows us to say with some certainty that it is.\ According to the passage, the Whitehead research has taken a big step in ______.

A. understanding cancer
B. curing cancer disease
C. eliminating cancer
D. preventing cancer