At a moment when cancer science is finally learning to speak the language of individual tumors, the resources that taught it that language are being withdrawn. Across the United States, death rates from cancer are falling — a hard-won achievement — yet younger people are being diagnosed at rates that would have seemed alarming a generation ago, and the researchers who might answer why are watching their funding contract. The paradox of progress interrupted is an old human story, but it carries particular weight when the interruption arrives just as the tools become equal to the questions.