The Nation - News from Nov. 24, 1988

President Reagan plans to name Dr. Samuel Broder, 43, a cancer researcher who has become famous for proving that the drug AZT is effective in treating AIDS, director of the National Cancer Institute, senior federal health officials said. Broder declined to comment on the reports of his appointment. But other researchers said that, as director, Broder could be expected to make cancer prevention and early diagnosis central priorities for the institute and perhaps to shift focus away from increasing reliance on purely technological approaches to treating the disease. Cancer researchers often say that many of the nearly 500,000 cancer deaths that occur in the United States each year could be prevented if changes in smoking and eating habits were combined with a greater reliance on early diagnosis.