Nowadays, p53 is like a Dreamliner airplane, riding the high skies of cancer research with dignity and pride. You do not have to be a card-bearing p53 researcher to know about p53, care about it, and respect it. Yet, this was not always so. As a matter of fact, in the first years of p53 research, from its discovery in the late 1970’s to about the end of the 1980’s, p53 was more like a kite: one moment high up in the air, the next moment being dragged on the ground.