Understanding these astonishing migrations through the human body, known as metastases, could suggest novel treatments

Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to walk. “When did this happen?” she asked from her hospital bed. “Why are the cells growing there?”

Why, indeed. Why would cancer cells migrate to the spinal fluid, far from where they’d been birthed, and how did they manage to thrive in a liquid so strikingly poor in nutrients?

Boire, a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, decided that those questions deserved answers.