Everyone knows and loves someone who has been stricken with cancer. Many have lost someone to cancer.
The same was once said of measles, polio and tuberculosis. And while cancer clearly is a much more complicated disease, there can be no excuse for not pursuing cancer’s cure far more vigorously.
That’s why President Obama’s “moonshot” to cure cancer was such a welcome announcement earlier this month.
Of course, it is an Obama initiative – so certainly there already have been naysayers who call the effort naive, especially from those who don’t understand the real aim or who were tripped up by the shorthand language of public communication to describe the “cure” as though it might be a preventive vaccine for people with genetic glitches.
That’s not the case. This initiative is prefaced on the understanding that there will be no single cure because cancer isn’t one disease but hundreds. This cure will build on scientists’ newest understandings of how cancer forms and spreads. It will be honed by scientists who are developing new ways to thwart cancer by using the body’s own defenses.