This article got me thinking. Oncology research sounds like live-debugging the race conditions of a millions-year-old, self-mutating program with billions (trillions) of lines of source code... And to top it all off, it's written in a language whose syntax is elusive.
If you're lucky, you can sometimes observe some aspects of its execution, but always at the cost of context-depriving tunnel vision, and only with a really expensive and proprietary IDE.
If that analogy's anywhere close to the mark, I can't imagine the patience of the people doing this research; bravo, sincerely.
With that analogy, this article suggests that researchers have attached an information-theory-backed meaning to a previously-observed pattern in the observed life cycle of our cells. The black box is revealing itself, with deliberate observation, to be an increasingly intricate and beautifully-designed grey box. Every lumen of that box is hard-fought, and must be super rewarding!
Nature's one heck of an engineer :)