The woman was gravely ill. Her name was Ms. Yamato. Thirty-seven years old, born in Osaka, Japan, she had never smoked, and yet there it was anyway: a spot on her lung.

A doctor had already performed a bronchoscopy and had made the diagnosis of cancer. Then he referred the patient to Mark Kris, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Seated alongside me in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Kris is showing me Ms. Yamato's electronic medical record on an iPad. "I'm preparing for the first visit," he explains, swiping the screen to show what that entails. He's interested in running at least two tests on the patient. The first is an MRI, to find out if the cancer has spread to her brain. The second involves a deeper diagnostic regimen. Lung cancer tumors are not all the same; there are thousands of variations. So a test that examines the mutations within a tumor will be crucial, he says. It so happens that cancer patients born in East Asia who have never smoked often have a particular mutation that responds well to a medication by the name of Erlotinib. That may be the case here. One can hope.

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