What can we do to BETTER concentrate our financial and intellectual resources towards the cure for cancer?

Question

The USA is by far the world's leader in medical research funding, productivity and knowledge. Yet by ALL measures we are not doing enough. We NEED to "crack some heads together" and bring the best minds into a "room" and force them to come to some solutions (typical and atypical solutions).

Almost half the people alive today will have cancer in their lifetimes.

That's a damn epidemic. And what are we doing about it? If you went back and added up all the budgets for the National Cancer Institute over the past THREE DECADES, we spent as much money on cancer as we spend in Iraq in NINE MONTHS.

It's time for a bold initiative to combat this disease which kills 560,000 Americans every year.

Answer 1

put more money into education.. mathematics combined with biology

Answer 2

You're underestimating the money being spent on cancer. The NCI doesn't have an exclusive on it. Much of the the NIH's money is allocated to cancer. Things like the human genome program are illuminating important information that cancer researchers are using.

Then add to that private industry--many companies are spending billions of dollars developing therapies for cancer.

Sadly, cancer is not "one" illness. It is potentially hundreds of diseases. In fact, a lot of progress has been made on a few types of cancer. There's still quite a bit more that needs to be learned, but there are hundreds of thousands of people (perhaps millions) working to solve the problem of cancer.

It isn't something that will have one cure, and it won't be something that we solve quickly by "cracking some heads together."

Cancer will be cured not only through developing drugs specific to cancer itself, but will also require much better understanding of biology. That will come through further expansion of human genome projects (there's now a project under discussion to identify the genetic variances in many types of cancer tissues), the proteome, research on inflammation and metabolism, bioinformatic techniques, etc. Things like computer technology, software, microchips, robotics, optics, imaging technology, the Internet--all of those things also contribute to curing cancer, although you might not think of it at first.

Ultimately, the limiting factor isn't money. It's people. At a certain point, throwing more money at cancer doesn't do anything if the scientists don't exist who want to solve the problem. The most important thing we can do to cure cancer, and to meet the challenges of the next few decades is to make things like calculus, writing, biology, physics and chemistry really interesting for people to learn.