It’s a pretty compelling argument, one with a long history and public support. This approach - or better yet, attacking the disease when the cells show only an early itch to cause trouble - would be cheaper, less toxic, and decidedly more effective, she writes.Ĭurrent cancer research is looking at the wrong end of the problem - late-stage disease, when the cancer is large and perhaps has already spread.

Most importantly, she argues that current cancer research is looking at the wrong end of the problem - late-stage disease, when the cancer is large and perhaps has already spread, when patients are sick and failing, when even the most wonderful new wonder drug is unlikely to work.īetter to find the cancers sooner, when the tumor burden - the actual number of cancer cells - is still small. Then therapies have a better chance of being effective: The lift is not so heavy, with a lower risk of genetic mutations that confer drug resistance or spotty penetration of medications into bulky growths.

We are using wrong-headed experimental models (animals, cells, and the entire 20th-century repertoire of discovery) and we are giving federal grants to all the wrong ideas. Recently, Clifton Leaf echoed this dour perspective in his 2013 book, “The Truth in Small Doses: Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer - and How to Win It,” while the poet Anne Boyer recounted her own cancer experience (and profound disappointment in modern care) this year in “The Undying.”Įnter Azra Raza, a prominent cancer specialist at Columbia University. Although she doesn’t consider herself a pessimist, her new book, “The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last,’’ argues that we have wasted precious time and zillions of dollars barking up the wrong scientific tree. Twenty-six years into the war, a harsh assessment titled “Cancer Undefeated” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, declaring it open season on any claims of victory, and the criticism has been steady ever since.

After all the time, money, and scientific talent poured into the problem, this progress doesn’t amount to all that much. And plenty of the criticism comes from high up in the medical hierarchy. On the positive side are stories, seemingly every day, of breakthroughs and miracle drugs, of triumphant against-all-odds cures featuring the latest treatments, be they based on molecular targets or tricks to stoke the immune system. And national trends seem promising: Cancer mortality has decreased from about 200 deaths per 100,000 people in the 1990s to roughly 163 per 100,000 in the 2010s. BOOK REVIEW - “The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last,” by Azra Raza (Basic Books, 368 pages).

Azra raza the first cell