ON THE LONG ROAD TO CURE CANCER

EARLY DAYS

The New York Times has a good start on a series on the "struggle to defeat Cancer" in this piece titled "Advanced Elusive in the drive to cure Cancer".  They start by making the point:

"Cancer has always been an expensive priority. Since the war on cancer began, the National Cancer Institute, the federal government’s main cancer research entity, with 4,000 employees, has alone spent $105 billion. And other government agencies, universities, drug companies and philanthropies have chipped in uncounted billions more.

Yet the death rate for cancer, adjusted for the size and age of the population, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. In contrast, the death rate for heart disease dropped 64 percent in that time, and for flu and pneumonia, it fell 58 percent.

Still, the perception, fed by the medical profession and its marketers, and by popular sentiment, is that cancer can almost always be prevented. If that fails, it can usually be treated, even beaten."

The piece does highlight the progress that has been made on a variety of fronts, including less harsher treatments for many types of cancer.
But it also goes on to ask and answer the "Big" questions:

"What has happened? Is cancer just an impossibly hard problem? Or is the United States, the only country to invest so much in cancer research, making fundamental mistakes in the way it fights the cancer war?
Researchers say the answer is yes on both counts.
Cancer is hard — it is not one disease or, if it is, no one has figured out the weak link in cancer cells that would lead to a cure. Instead, cancer investigators say, the more they study cancer, the more complex it seems. Many are buoyed by recent progress in cancer molecular biology, but confess they have a long way to go."

There's a lot to understand about this question and the piece is a good start to a promising series.
*Image source.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

I wonder how much the "war on cancer" is just maintained to keep researchers employed? The NIH has been criticized for being far too timid in its funding for research, preferring safe projects to really blue sky ones.

Now I am well aware cancer is a tough nut to crack, because it is not a disease, but a failure of the normal apoptosis mechanism in the cell to work. But we are making headway and I do expect some headway to be made now that we can tackle the problem using much deeper knowledge of how th ecell works and how to measure each component.