Will we ever win the war on cancer? Richard Nixon had every reason to be optimistic when, during his 1971 State of the Union address, he called for a concerted effort to find a cure for cancer. After all, it took only three years for the Manhattan Project to produce the world’s first atomic bomb. Nixon’s own presidency witnessed the 1969 moon landing, a goal set forth by John F. Kennedy in 1961. It seemed that given enough resources there was no job that Americans couldn’t tackle quickly. But with $200 billion spent and tens of millions of cancer deaths accumulated since 1971, most would say we are losing the war on cancer. Cancer is the top killer worldwide, responsible for 7.4 million or 13 percent of all deaths annually. In America cancer will soon overtake heart disease as the top killer, claiming more than half million lives annually. The situation isn’t entirely grim. We’ve made some strides, and new research on stem cells, immunotherapy and genomic medicine offers much hope. But don’t except the war to end anytime soon. We’re only really very good at curing mice of cancer. The stumbling block has been […]