On Dec. 30, 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Tamoxifen, an anti-estrogen drug, for the treatment of breast cancer. Tamoxifen was first synthesized in 1962 by scientists at Imperial Chemical Industries, now known as AstraZeneca.

Tamoxifen is a medication used to treat and prevent breast cancer in women. It is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), which means it works by blocking the effects of estrogen in certain tissues, such as breast cancer cells.

We know from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) estrogen-only trial that there is a profound decrease in the incidence of breast cancer and mortality for women treated with estrogen in their 60’s when compared to placebo. Estrogen kills estrogen-deprived occult cancer cells more than a decade post menopause.

None of this science would have been revealed but for the fact that long term adjuvant tamoxifen advanced from a laboratory concept in the late 1970’s, through clinical trials, to be enhanced as a reality by the Oxford overview analyses.

Today we have a successful clinical strategy with the results of ATLAS (Davies et al. 2013) and aTTom (The aTTom Collaborative Group 2013). Further lives are saved with a cheap effective medicine that never went away. The science of long-term adjuvant tamoxifen was indeed an adventure, discovery, new horizons, insights into our world, a means of predicting the future and enormous power to help others.