War On Cancer

12 Pages 2931 Words

In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon declared the “War on Cancer.” Despite the huge amount of funds dedicated to the research, little progress in actually finding the cure for cancer has been made. Since President Nixon launched the nation's war on cancer [more than] 25 years ago, [over] $25 billion has been spent fighting the disease. While scientists' understanding of the biology of cancer has greatly expanded, cancer incidence and mortality rates of the majority of the cancers have continued to climb. Lack of success to cure the illness is due to the complexity of the disease in addition to the money in the politics. Despite the fact that a cure hasn’t been found, there are no grounds to be able to say that significant progress has not been made. The scientific community has made leaps and bounds in the direction of finding the cure.
Cancer is feared like no other illness. It is not racist or judgmental; its victims have no distinct characteristics. It strikes the young, the old, the healthy, the weak, and in virtually any bodily tissue. The only real cure today is prevention, and ignorance to the disease only allows it to grow stronger; sometimes even this isn’t enough. It not only crosses racial boundaries, but the limits of science. Cancer cells divide without restraint, cross borders they were meant to respect, and fail to display the characteristics of the cell lineage from which they were derived. With the death rate from heart disease going down and the cancer death rate rising, cancer is expected to become the nation's leading cause of death in less than a decade (Advances in Cancer Research).
At first, cancer was believed to be the result of environmental factors such as pollution, second hand smoke (also known as environmental cancer smoke), radon in the home, and benzene in the air. Then, it was believed that by avoiding these environmental factors, and obeying certain behavioral factors, one wo...