Recently, Clifton Leaf echoed this dour perspective in his 2013 book, The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer - and How to Win It, while the poet Anne Boyer recounted her own cancer experience (and profound disappointment in modern care) this year in “The Undying.”Įnter Azra Raza, a prominent cancer specialist at Columbia University. Although she doesn’t consider herself a pessimist, her new book, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, argues that we have wasted precious time and zillions of dollars barking up the wrong scientific tree.
Twenty-six years into the war, a harsh assessment titled “Cancer Undefeated” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, declaring it open season on any claims of victory, and the criticism has been steady ever since. After all the time, money, and scientific talent poured into the problem, this progress doesn’t amount to all that much. And plenty of the criticism comes from high up in the medical hierarchy. On the positive side are stories, seemingly every day, of breakthroughs and miracle drugs, of triumphant against-all-odds cures featuring the latest treatments, be they based on molecular targets or tricks to stoke the immune system. And national trends seem promising: Cancer mortality has decreased from about 200 deaths per 100,000 people in the 1990s to roughly 163 per 100,000 in the 2010s. D epending on who is speaking, the war against cancer that President Nixon declared nearly half a century ago has either been a soaring triumph of innovation and doggedness or a colossal failure, featuring lunkhead decisions, bottomless greed, and annoyed experts hurrying from here to there.
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