Significant discoveries have been made in the past. Here is a summary of some of the most important discoveries of the past:
| 1970 | Surgeon General finally agrees that cigarette smoking is irrefutably linked to cancer. |
| 1970 | First oncogene is identified in a chicken tumor virus by Peter Vogt and Hidesaburo Hanfusa. |
| 1972 | E. Donnall Thomas pioneers the technique of bone marrow transplatation to treat cancer. |
| 1973 | Paul Berg clones the first gene. |
| 1976 | J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus discover proto-oncogenes in normal DNA, suggesting that a normal gene can potentially become an oncogene. |
| 1978 | Walter Gilbert adn Frederick Sanger develop technique to sequence DNA. |
