NY Times: Now there’s suddenly hope for cancer?
Thanks to head tracker Charlie Petit for taking note, while I was traveling, of Amy Harmon‘s three-part series, Target Cancer, in The New York Times earlier this week.
This is a meticulous, thorough story of the early success of a new cancer drug, at “a watershed moment in understanding genetic changes that cause cancer.”
Well, that’s pretty darn optimistic. And startling from a newspaper that has been hammering us about the failure of the war on cancer for almost a year now, as I’ve noted here in the past. The paper was not deterred even by an AP story–which the Times published on page A24–that said the cancer death rate in the U.S. “is continuing to decline.”
So which is it? We’ve lost the war on cancer? (Bad news.) Death rates are declining? (Good news.) We’re at a watershed moment in dealing with cancer? (More good news.)
Readers of the Times might be forgiven for not knowing whether we’re winning the war on cancer, losing it, or whether we’ve pulled all of our troops out of the fight.
And the Times is only making it worse.
- Paul Raeburn
February 26th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
The Times’s over-optimism about cancer progress has irritated science writers before, if you recall. Remember the angiogenesis story of several years ago? Although I always thought the piece itself contained a number of cautions and didn’t warrant quite the scorn it received on the listservs. It was the play–not just page 1, but I think also above the fold–that granted it more importance than it probably deserved.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Unlike some of their previous recent pieces, this one was not so much a progress report as a detailed, narrative chapter from the trenches of research on targeted therapy – or so it seemed to me. Yes, there was some optimism about this approach, which is what clinical cancer research is hanging its hat on, but one couldn’t help but be impressed with how difficult and uncertain the early clinical testing of new drugs is. I thought she did a good job.
IMO, the tired “war” metaphor is a misleading distraction, and arguing whether the war is being “won” or “lost” is pretty useless; there is some incremental progress in several cancers, some exciting promise with molecularly targeted therapies but it is very early days. It will be a long slog and cancer is unlikely to be “defeated,” “cured,” or “eliminated” in the foreseeable future, but, as the mantra is now, perhaps controlled like a chronic disease.