Profits and False Promises
November 17, 2025 at 10:44PMAmerica’s half-century “war on cancer” has little to do with preventing exposure to the chemicals that cause it. Indeed, as Sofi Thanhauser points out at the Virginia Quarterly Review, “prevention” itself is a misnomer. Thanhauser’s essay moves briskly between her own cancer treatment and a damning history of regulatory neglect, and invites us to “think about the promise to cure cancer . . . as the inscription of a ritual, as an incantation or part of a liturgy,” one whose tolls rise the longer we repeat it to ourselves.
Since President Richard Nixon launched the war on cancer in 1971, politicians from both parties have consistently supported high levels of spending on cancer research. The National Cancer Act of 1971 unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars every year (mostly funneled through the National Cancer Institute) for research in universities, hospitals, cancer centers, and community clinics. Subsequent Congresses steadily increased all funding for cancer research, such that it rose from $500 million in 1972 to $6.5 billion in 2021.
As the budget grew, the promise remained the same. Barack Obama encouraged America to cure cancer “once and for all.” George W. Bush campaigned on the promise of a “medical moonshot” to find cures for cancer and other illnesses. Bill Clinton called for a commitment to funding “research that once and for all can win this war.” George H. W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush launched “C-Change: Collaboration to Conquer Cancer.” Ronald Reagan defined success in the war on cancer to be a 50 percent reduction in cancer deaths by the end of the century, and set that as a goal. Every time a new president took office, he rallied the troops for this war. The war was premised on a promise: Cancer could be cured.
But buried beneath this evergreen drama of illness and cure, the promise of miracle biotech breakthroughs and heroic survivorship, is the story of how American business interests helped to steer politicians away from stopping the cancer epidemic at the source; how they helped to generate a mania for curing the disease and obstructed the analytic and moral clarity required to prevent it. Actually preventing cancer—far preferable to curing it, if less interesting—would mean asking why our cancer rates are so high in the first place.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/17/war-on-cancer-prevention/
via IFTTT
Watch