Looks like a birthday party
Probably mid 80s.
That piano is back home now, and I am trying to re-learn to play it.
It is over 100 years old. Even older than me.
My thanks to Dick Ingwall for easing me through a dark and
dreary Saturday painlessly, and even a little bit profitably. Dick turned me on to an occasional series in
the NYTimes called “RetroReport”, which consists of follow-up accounts of
interesting news stories from the fairly recent past. I spent several happy hours reading
them. However, Dick wanted me to see a
Retro on the “War on Cancer”, which I did.
That’s what I’m going to write about.
Here is the link. It has a video
attached which is well worth enduring the inevitable initial ad to play itself
out. Hey, they’ve got to make money some
way!
The War on Cancer (about which I have written before) began
during the Nixon administration – and is still going on. The idea, which sounded reasonable at the
time, was that we could treat the eradication of cancer in the same
(successful) way we had treated the Manhattan project (developing the atom bomb
before Hitler beat us to it), or perhaps the race to the moon. It was felt that if the vast resources of
America – brains, equipment, money – could be efficiently focused on the task
of curing cancer once and for all, success would be inevitable, and moreover not long delayed. The most important force behind the War was a
New York heiress and socialite, Mary Lasker.
All good causes in this world should have their Mary Laskers. Unfortunately, few do.
Anyway, we all know how the War is playing itself out. Cancer turned out to be much more complicated
than was conceived in the 1970s. The
“task” of defeating cancer evolved into a multitude of separate tasks, one for
each kind of cancer. “Cancer”, it was
realized, was not one disease but a whole bunch of separate
diseases. We made progress good against
some of these diseases (cervical, colorectal, lung, for instance) but have made
distressingly little headway against others (pancreatic and ovarian are
examples.) Our War has begun to resemble
WW I; we are bogged down in the trenches.
Our side is slightly ahead, but there is a long way to go before
“Cancer” sues for peace. This NYTimes article
mentions several possible ways to break the stalemate, most of which I have
written about before. Finely targeted therapies based on genetics and molecular biology are the new weapons of choice. In some fields prevention is prospering. Early detection is stumbling forward a little. But - no silver bullet yet.
Oh, by the way. We
have spent about $100 billion in the Cancer War so far. This may sound like a lot but it is trivial:
by one estimate, about 1.5% of the cost of the war in Iraq..
I am going to make a reading recommendation, but it is
accompanied by a warning: This book may
be hazardous to your mental health. The
book is The Emperor of all Maladies: A
biography of cancer*. The author is
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist.
Some of the scenes in the book are so horrifying that they pop into my
mind when I’m trying to sleep – and make me cringe. And I read the book at least three years
ago. Dr.Mukherjee got the Pulitzer Prize
for this book. If there is a prize for
making peoples’ skin crawl, he should win that one, too. If you are really interested in cancer I
encourage you to read this book. But not
for pleasure.
*Available from Abebooks.com for under $10
I’m glad you brought this book up again. I have been undecided about whether I want to delve into it. Not having the strong leaning towards science that so many in my family have, I don’t want to be overwhelmed by molecular biology. I am much more interested in the emotional side of disease and death. Let’s talk more about it when I next see you.
ReplyDeleteThe NYT retro report was interesting. Thanks for the link. Good blog.
The book is not heavy to biochemistry, although it gets a little sticky toward the end. It is more about the myriad mistaken avenues medical science has gone down seeking a cure. Some of the things they did to people in the 19th and early 20th centuries make you cringe. They would have accomplished as much using voodoo, and with none of the suffering. But I suppose that someday historians of medicine will look back on our “enlightened” day and shudder. “My God, they used to POISON their patients and then hope that the cancer died in time for its host to be saved!” It’s all in your viewing platform. Yes, we are making incremental progress, but in my opinion only a significant paradigm-shift will lead to a real breakthrough.
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