Three years ago, when the National Cancer Institute proposed its monumental $1.5 billion effort to catalog the genomic changes involved in cancer, the goal was to improve the ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer. Now the first results of The Cancer Genome Atlas project (TCGA) have arrived, and they reinforce the emerging realization that the more researchers investigate the genetics of cancer, the farther away new therapeutic applications seem to get. In response, some researchers say that it's time to step back and look at cancer holistically, searching not for the individual genetic mutations but instead for unifying principles that underlie the disease process.