The “war on cancer” is a 40-year old failure that is evolving into fraud. “Racing for the cure” may have made you feel better, but it and its genre of “research” and activism have been a colossal waste of time, effort and money. You don’t need sunglasses to see its future, but a good prosecutor might help.
“… the troubles have resulted in “wasted efforts expended in low value activities” at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer.” [Associated Press]
In a slight bit of irony, the story was originally reported by SciGuy Eric Berger, science writer for the Houston Chronicle. Eric is a pretty level headed guy, even if a moderate warmist, altho I find it difficult to call someone a warmist who merely repeats what he hears and reads. If you want a real chuckle however, peruse SciGuy’s comment fields for one JohnD, a parrot in the 1st degree and Champion of Argument by Authority.
http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/12/breaking-investor-in-cancer-company-also-supplemented-salaries-of-cancer-agency-staffers/
There has been progress with childhood leukemia and testicular cancer. Little progress anywhere else, though. Consider the hundreds of billions raised and expended, that is a poor return on investment.
The “War on Cancer” is doomed from its own premise. Cancer is no more of an effect of a single or small set of causes than bone fractures. You cannot prevent or ‘cure’ either a priori because there are an unlimited number of possible causes, and no measures that deal with a finite set of causes will suffice for total prevention. Each instance must be dealt with individually.
Indeed, some known causes of cancer (ingestion of radioactive materials or exposure to cosmic rays, for example) are pragmatically impossible to avoid.
I dunno that the “war on cancer” is a complete failure. We have a teen at our church who came through childhood leukemia ten years ago; twenty years earlier,she’d likely have died and forty years earlier almost certainly.
Senator Thompson has an active cancer diagnosis and an effective treatment program; he functions at a high level even with the active disease.
There are fewer deaths from cancer in a larger population, so the rate is significantly down. (Of course that just means something else is the new No. 2 killer behind heart disease.) More people are conscious, maybe too conscious, of how their lifestyle choices affect their cancer risks.
Fraud and wasted effort? I’m sure there’s a good deal of both. In research and in clinical practice, it often takes decades to shake out which approaches are genuinely effective. A push toward more lucrative therapies and programs rather than less expensive ones? Very possibly, and we should have an eye on that issue.
Absolutely right. Just follow the money trail. – There are better ways of dealing with some kinds of cancers – good work is being done in clinics in Germany, Mexico and China and is being ignored because it sets a new paradigm. Yes, there are alternative hustlers too – I don’t deny that. The money train doesn’t want to examine the genuine work though. So people suffer unnecessarily. And the rich get richer. Nothing new about that.