It was in the mid- to late 1960s when we first were able to cure some forms of advanced cancer with drugs and attack the problem of metastases directly. The treatment of cancer is the treatment of metastases we can see on x-rays and other tests or metastases we can presume are present because of a known high risk of recurrence with a localized form of treatment. Treatment with chemotherapy or biologic therapy because of a presumed risk of recurrence—adjuvant therapy—is applicable to a larger number of patients and was successfully introduced in about 1970 only after we could show that we could cure more-advanced cancers. It is now known to work for many common cancers, like breast and colon cancer, although not well enough.
Using these approaches, we can now cure about half of all patients with serious cancers in the U.S. and Canada. By serious cancers we mean those that would lead to rapid death if not treated effectively. We exclude about 500,000 easily curable and rarely lethal skin cancers, so strictly speaking our ability to cure all cancers is much higher, about 58 percent. The problem is that 50 percent of patients with serious cancers are still dying, and since we now freely discuss cancer, they are more visible to us than in the past. Patients who are cured are less visible because they largely go about enjoying life and look and act like the rest of us.
New Understanding The major investment of the war on cancer was in basic laboratory research. Because of the advances made in the laboratory, the lid of the black box has been pried open and the black box has become a blueprint. Using powerful new tools that probe our very genes, we can literally see inside the cancer
