I should have posted this last year (as in last week), but we've just celebrated the 40 year war on cancer.
This NPR article provides a great overview of the "war".
Dr. Harold Varmus (the interviewee) isn't only in charge of the National Cancer Institute, but he won the Nobel Prize for figuring out that some oncogenes (genes that can contribute to cancer if mutated) have their origins with RNA viruses. Those viruses, called retroviruses, become incorporated into their host cells' DNA and use the host to replicate. About 5% of the human genome contains retrovirus DNA.
We've made some terrific progress over 40 years, but most people living in the 1970's would have expected more, I suspect. That's because rather than being a single disease with a single cause, cancer is a fundamental, but very complex phenomenon associated with evolutionary biology and life itself.
In 1900, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death followed by pneumonia in the U.S. By 1940, heart disease was first followed by cancer. And that's the rankings today.
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