Over 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon authorized a War On Cancer, with the goal that cancer could be conquered with the right amount of money and ingenuity.
In the last decade there began to be rumblings about the cost versus actual benefit, and the general wisdom of creating a "Manhattan Project Of..." everything the government decided to tackle. It has instead become common wisdom that more government money will not solve anything. President Bush doubled the budget for the NIH and cancer was not cured. Instead, the government-funded science community has been saying cancer can't be cured, it can only be managed. And the National Cancer Institute had to deflect findings from U.S. General Accounting Office was manipulating cancer statistics to "artificially inflate the amount of 'true' progress".
Cancer deaths have not gone down, even with the War On Smoking, but Alex Berezow debunks the War On Cancer debunkers, noting that cancer deaths have gone up because people are living longer due to lots of other treatments - long enough that they can get cancer.
We are winning, he notes. Slowly, and it has certainly become more manageable, and that may have to be the final goal: like diabetes, which was also once a death sentence, but is now treated quite well.
We Are Slowly Winning the War on Cancer By Alex B. Berezow, Real Clear Science
