The Economist
The world is winning the war on cancer
IN 1971 RICHARD NIXON, then America’s president, announced a “war on cancer”. Just two years earlier the Apollo programme had combined big science and big government to put astronauts on the Moon, so hopes were high. Some optimistic doctors talked of a cure for cancer within a few years.
They were wrong. Today every adult has had cancer, knows someone who has, or both. Half of men and a third of women in rich countries can expect to suffer from it at some point in their lives. In America, where it is the second-most-common cause of death, just behind heart disease, it kills around 600,000 people a year. Worldwide, it is responsible for about one in six of all deaths. If your criterion for success was a cure within a decade—or even two or three or four—then you might conclude that the war on cancer has been lost.