Clifton Leaf

If the people funding our cancer research were the ones funding our first boatbuilders, [former CEO of Intel Andy] Grove told me, no one would ever have sailed an ocean. ‘We’d still be studying the basic questions of flow dynamics,’ he said.

Without question, some of those discoveries have saved lives. However, America’s four-decade investment in cancer research—a total of more than $300 billion (inflation-adjusted) in taxpayer spending, private R&D, and donations—has not stopped, or even substantially slowed, the soaring cancer burden. ‘More money’ has not solved the problem.

There were 567,628 deaths from cancer in 2009, some 62,000 more than there were in 1990. How was it possible that an additional 62,000 cancer deaths per year could translate into a celebration? (Sixty-two thousand deaths is more than US losses from the entire Vietnam War.) How could anyone have scanned the rising toll from cancer, decade after decade, and concluded that the ‘news had never been better’?

Unmentioned in the tally of survivors is how many are likely to relapse after the five-year benchmark or succumb to metastases later on. ... Nonetheless, in official recordkeeping, a patient who dies after a grueling six-year fight with breast cancer is placed in the ‘survived’ category. (By such accounting, the late Elizabeth Edwards is considered a treatment success.)

Our current system is designed not to solve problems, but to produce studies.

Even four decades ago, most patients with early-stage disease lived at least five years. But patients with metastatic cancer still face nearly the same dire odds they did at the start of the cancer war.

Despite the seemingly endless procession of discoveries in the lab, despite the spate of recorded ‘wonder drugs,’ the deadliest malignancies are still nearly as deadly in 2013 as they were at the start of the cancer war. Fewer than a fifth of Americans diagnosed today with a cancer of the lung, pancreas, liver, or esophagus are expected to live five years. Likewise, cancers of the stomach, brain and ovary largely remain the killers they were at the start of the cancer war.