The Politics of Cancer

...Two-pack-a-day smokers increase their risk of lung cancer by about twenty times...

...The X-ray levels used in standard mammography have declined in recent years, but criticisms are still raised that too many younger women, and not enough older women, are being screened...

...The first illustrates the power of the state to intervene in this area...

...The production and management of uncertainty has facilitated what one might call the "MacNeil-Lehrerization of science": the media display of equal and opposing views on apparently settled questions, generating the sense that endlessly "more research" is needed to resolve guilt or innocence in questions of carcinogenesis...

...Why are the cancers that affect men better understood than cancers that affect women?2 Who does science and who gets science done to them...

...Why not say that poverty or faulty education is the primary cause of lung cancer...

...Hueper was head of the 218 • DISSENT Green Politics Environmental Cancer Section of the National Cancer Institute from 1948 to 1964, and was celebrated by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring as "the father of environmental carcinogenesis...

...Thousands of political prisoners labored in these camps: 64 in 1946 (all Germans, presumably Nazis...

...Scientists and science mongers often speak royally about how "we" know this or that—but who is that we and why does it know what is knows...

...2. Who gains from knowledge (or ignorance...

...3 See my "The Oberrothenbach Catastrophe," Science, 260 (1993): 1676-1677...

...We need to focus on the seamy sides of science and not just its polished carapace...

...It is already the number one cause of death in Japan...

...If poverty is what distinguishes AfricanAmerican cancer rates from EuropeanAmerican rates, why does the National Cancer Institute classify by race rather than by income...

...Optimistic activism, though, requires a solid understanding of the politics of science: how priorities and practices are shaped by power formations, ideological gaps, interests and disinterests, government and industrial support (or lack thereof), disciplinary dogmas, and professional or institutional parochialisms...

...I do not want to leave the impression that there are not inherent features of the cancer problem that make it difficult to obtain solid knowledge...

...Czech security authorities were purportedly afraid that from uranium health statistics one could calculate uranium production levels and the quality of uranium being mined...

...Looking to the future: if the U.S...

...Hair colorings are suspected of causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but that too is disputed...

...The tragedy is magnified by the fact that the causes of cancer are largely known—and have been known for quite some time...

...See Victor R. Hirsch, "Industry Performance and Public Opinion," in The Cosmetic Industry: Scientific and Regulatory Foundations, ed...

...Vladimir Rericha, the chief epidemiologist at the Czechoslovakian Health Institute of the Uranium Industry, told me that he and his colleagues had shown that Czech uranium miners were dying from lung cancer at about five times the rate of coal miners...

...How does one put such ideas into practice...

...All use science as a form of public relations: all prove the verity of Gibson's Law—I refer of course to the principle that "For every Ph.D...

...The New England Journal of Medicine in 1984 reported that people with colon cancer—America's second largest cancer killer (after lung)—who receive chemotherapy alongside surgical removal of tumors did not live any longer than people who receive no chemotherapy...

...Cervical cancer is rare in nuns, but is quite common in prostitutes...

...One has, in other words, to study the "social construction of ignorance...

...Dietary cancers are usually classed as "life-style cancers," but how much can one blame the changes in eating habits that have followed the triumph of transport-based petrochemical agribusiness...

...More than a thousand people die of cancer every day in the United States...

...Some of that ignorance is not just a natural consequence of the ever shifting boundary between the known and the unknown but a political consequence of decisions concerning how to approach (or neglect) what could and should be done to eliminate the disease...

...Science has a face, a house, and a price: one has to ask who is doing science, in what institutional context, and at what cost...

...Malignant melanoma is nearly 100 percent curable if detected early, and many lymphomas respond well to chemotherapy...

...Hueper later complained that censorship of his and other studies had delayed measures to remedy the situation, leaving countless men to die who could have been saved...

...of a particular sort and who loses...

...Prisoners worked the hottest ores...

...Nuns have long been known to have very high rates...

...Is it really the case that, as Samuel Epstein suggested fifteen years ago in his Politics of Cancer, "While 216 • DISSENT Green Politics much is known about the science of cancer, its prevention depends largely, if not exclusively, on political action...

...state authorities on both sides engineered cancer clusters and then silenced efforts to expose and ameliorate those clusters...

...Let me give two examples: the life and times of Wilhelm C. Hueper and the story of trade associations...

...What Causes Cancer...

...The study also found that chemotherapy actually increased the risk of leukemia...

...lives...

...Science requires empirical verification, but the rabid distrust of a well-founded hypothetical can be used to dismiss a plausible point (as when animal evidence of carcinogenicity is dismissed by industry-financed skeptics...

...The question of where the "real cause" lies is politicized, with the "moralistic left" favoring attention to ultimate (or social) causes, and the "stonewalling right" favoring attention to more proximate causes or mechanisms...

...What is strange to a historian is that many of these same debates have been going on for more than a century...

...The Tobacco Institute can support "good" medical research, but the hoped-for effect may be good will toward the industry...

...There are good reasons to believe that critically informed public health measures could greatly lessen our cancer load, and this is reason, I believe, for optimistic activism...

...Does one stop (or start) with genetics, or immunology, or epidemiology...

...Cancer for Tanchou and his followers was a "disease of civilization": more common in towns than in the countryside, in Europe than in Africa, among domesticated than among wild animals, and so forth...

...Unambiguous knowledge of genetic susceptibilities may have to wait for new techniques of DNA analysis, and improvements in therapy may well have to await dissection of the protein products of cancer genes...

...Many nickel-and-dime carcinogens conferring, say, a 5 percent or 10 percent increased likelihood of disease are epidemiologically invisible, because the number of people one would have to study to obtain statistically significant results would be too large to be feasible...

...Wilhelm C. Hueper's suppression by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s is surely one of the most dramatic and consequential examples of U.S...

...5,500 in 1950...

...Science seeks to reduce uncertainty—but the demand that regulators hold back until all uncertainty is eliminated can be used as an excuse to do nothing...

...Richard Doll and other "cancer conservatives" claim that the increases can be explained by reference to improved diagnostics and access to medical care...

...No one really knows how serious is the hazard posed by radon gas seeping into basements or by electromagnetic fields from high-voltage wires and household appliances...

...Doubt is Our Product" There are forty thousand trade associations in the United States, the primary purpose of which is to do in aggregate what a single firm is often unable or unwilling to do—take the heat, respond to the press, coordinate product safety and legal research, and so forth...

...Lurking behind much of the present discussion is a similar question of whether environmental degradation is really as unhealthy as environmentalists have made it out to be...

...Cancer, in other words, is not a constant of the human condition but a product of the substances to which we are exposed at home or at work, the life-styles we lead...

...Evidence accumulates that chlorinated water causes bladder cancer, but the Chlorine Institute, a trade association, disputes that evidence...

...Thirty percent of all cancer, for example, is said to be due to smoking, but what is smoking due to...

...The concept of causation is part of the problem: much of the politics of cancer research lies in how far down in the chain of causation one is willing and able to look...

...Even where survival rates really have improved, this may or may not have to do with the treatment patients receive...

...Billion-dollar industries have sprung up to "abate" or "remediate" environmental hazards such as asbestos, lead, and radon, and much of the industry of the twenty-first century will probably be devoted to cleaning up the industry of the twentieth...

...My concern is that inadequate attention has been given to how one should look and act to discover causes and organize prevention...

...ignorance and uncertainty are manufactured, maintained, and disseminated...

...3. How might knowledge be different, and how should knowledge be different...

...Rericha tried to publish his findings in 1966, but was barred from doing so by the State Security Police...

...they take us beyond the merry-go-round of realism vs...

...I call this the "smoke-screen effect" —the effort to jam the scientific air waves with true but trivial work, the net effect of which is to distract from what is going on underneath...

...Understanding such things can give us insight into why scientific tools are sharp for certain kinds of problems and dull for others— it might also help us to see why the war against cancer is going so badly...

...Similarly dissatis cious of fairy tales that recite the triumph of medical reason over popular superstition, but I don't take this as grounds for pessimism...

...A related kind of short-sightedness can be found in the effort to rest analysis after classifying a given percentage of cancers as due to "life-style factors...

...The persistence of controversy is often not a natural consequence of imperfect knowledge but a political consequence of conflicting interests and structural apathies...

...If present trends continue, cancer will become the first world's leading cause of death sometime in the twenty-first century...

...Why not say that cancer is caused by cigarette advertising, tobacco subsidizing, fear of fat, or youthful illusions of immortality...

...What or whom is knowledge for, and what or whom is it against...

...Florida, for example, has a much higher annual cancer death rate than Alaska (250/100,000 vs...

...Can cancer be caused by elections, or recessions, or ad-induced habits and fashions...

...The Calorie Control Council kept saccharin on the market after it was shown to cause cancer in rats...

...A lead-zinc trade association may call for more study of the effects of lead on intelligence, but the main goal may be to raise doubts about evidence of a health risk...

...The dollars behind these "Hertz rent-ascientists" — as Time magazine has christened them—are often substantia1...

...The World Health Organization estimates that about three million people are killed by cigarettes every year worldwide...

...Adjusting for age, one finds that Floridians actually have a slightly lower cancer mortality rate than Alaskans (163/100,000 compared to 184/100,000...

...Especially since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, we have heard that the risks posed by toxic contaminants have been exaggerated: that the widely publicized "alar scare" of 1989, for example, was hysterical media-hype fostered by power-hungry environmentalists, that fear of chemicals may do more harm than the agents feared...

...They require that we entertain a broader notion of science than is common coinage among positivists, postpositivists (notably Kuhn), and some of the more passive social constructivists...

...Cancer is the plague of the twentieth century, second only to heart disease as a cause of death in most industrial nations...

...A 1991 study released by the institute showed that although people diagnosed with cancer do generally live somewhat longer (51 percent now live five years or more, compared with 49 percent in the mid-1970s), part of this meager improvement is due to a statistical sleight of hand: people who used to die four years after diagnosis may now die after five, the "improvement" due to the discovery of their cancer a year earlier than used to be the case...

...Doubts have been raised about whether the hazards of dioxin have been exaggerated, whether all or only one kind of asbestos (amphibole) is dangerous, whether industrial life is as perilous as we are often led to believe...

...As one tobacco company puts it: "Doubt is our product...

...Chemotherapy has dramatically increased the life expectancy of children diagnosed with leukemia, and Hodgkin's disease and testicular cancer are now quite treatable...

...The cold war quest for national security claimed lives on both sides of the Iron Curtain...

...the Chlorine Institute has helped to rescue the reputation of SPRING • 1994 • 219 Green Politics dioxin, and the American Council on Science and Health even manages to claim that a little bit of dioxin is good for you...

...Similar doubts have been raised concerning surgery and radiation—the other two legs of the therapeutic triad (also known as poison, slash, and burn...

...The interests at stake, in other words, are complex and sometimes shifting...

...We are rightfully suspiNotes Old age is of course a major cause of cancer, which is why death rates are generally presented as "age-adjusted" figures...

...Notwithstanding repeated and glowing pronouncements from the American Cancer Society, cancer treatment has made little progress since Richard Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971...

...Philosophers have not yet focused on science as an instrument of public relations, perhaps because the story to be told is not a very cheerful one...

...headquarters some 1,700 trade associations, making trade association business, after tourism, the second-ranking private industry in the nation's capital...

...In 1900, women died of cancer far more often than men...

...that number is expected to grow to about ten million per year in the early decades of the next century...

...Ninety-five percent of all lung cancers still prove fatal, regardless of what form of treatment one chooses...

...Hormonal fluctuations are commonly invoked to explain the disease, but surely there is something wrong with the explanation offered by Malcolm Pike, that the disease is due to women's "incessant ovulation...

...one in five will die from it...

...Trade associations such as these make it their business to exploit, disseminate, and, if need be, produce uncertainty in the area of environmental carcinogenesis...

...In the United States, African Americans suffer significantly higher rates of death from nearly every form of cancer than do whites (skin cancer being the only notable exception), though studies have shown that it is poverty— rather than race—that is the root cause of the difference...

...Cancer research itself is a very big business, and the research establishment has vested interests in particular kinds of approaches rather than others...

...Bowel cancer is rare in countries where meat is not a regular part of the diet and where large amounts of fiber are consumed...

...Who gets cancer, where and how, in short, is a cultural artifact...

...Even "industry interests" are not what they used to be...

...As early as 1843, Stanislas Tanchou, physician to the king in Paris, presented statistics to prove that cancer was on the rise...

...See the American Cancer Society's Cancer Facts & Figures — 1992 (New York, 1992), p. 7. 2 Early childbirth is known to lessen one's risk of breast cancer, and late or no childbirth at all seems to heighten the risk...

...Pipe smoking was first recognized as a cause of lip cancer in 1761, two centuries after Raleigh's transatlantic transport of tobacco...

...In 1948 he had begun a project to document lung cancers among the uranium miners of the Colorado plateau, but his efforts were stymied by the AEC's director of biology and medicine, who ordered him to delete all references to uranium mining at a scientific meeting he planned to attend...

...q fying are reassurances that Long Island's high breast cancer rate can be explained by the high proportion of Jews living on the island: Jewish women may have high breast cancer rates, but why, the question then becomes, is that the case...

...Cancers are misfits in the world that epidemiologists want to attribute neatly to life-style, occupation, genetics, and infection...

...In consequence of these gloomy findings, it has become hard to deny that the war against cancer is being lost...

...Recent debates over what causes cancer bring these concerns into focus, because the terrain is among the most highly contested in all of modern science...

...A chemical manufacturer may promote research into the hazards of a hydrocarbon, but the hoped-for effect may be to insinuate ambiguity and thereby delay regulation...

...The emphasis on immediate mechanisms is attractive for those who believe that the large is to be explained by the small but never vice versa: the search for underlying causes exclusively in terms of biological mechanisms—flaws in the somatic genome, the molecular biochemistry of initiators and pro moters, the activity of oncogenes and the like—effaces the diversity of social causes that "ultimately" produce the real-world variety of cancers in the first place...

...Even X-ray mammography turns out to be both more and less than advertised: for women under the age of forty, for example, there are probably as many tumors caused by the procedure as are detected and cured as a result of it...

...Questions such as these are self-consciously political and ethical...

...Bruce Ames of Berkeley has generated endless controversy with his contention that peanut butter and barbecued meats contain potent carcinogens, and that drinking a single glass of wine is thousands of times more hazardous than pesticide contaminated water...

...relativism that plagues so much of recent science studies discourse...

...One of his colleagues at the Health Institute led me to papers from the newly-opened state security archives describing conditions at seventeen "uranium mine concentration camps" established in the late 1940s and early 1950s to work the mines...

...dye workers suffer cancers of the bladder and stomach...

...Was Ronald Reagan a carcinogen...

...This was the conclusion of an article published in the 1986 New England Journal of Medicine by John Bailar and Elaine Smith...

...General Principles Let me stand back from particular controversies for a moment and say something about methodology...

...In 1994, cancer will kill more than fifteen times that many: 538,000 according to American Cancer Society projections...

...The American Industrial Health Council is a leading advocate of "go-slow" policies in the area of environmental regulation—as is the Synthetic Organic Chemicals Manufacturers Association, a consortium of twenty-one associations ranging from the Silicones Health Council to the Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether Task Force...

...there's an equal and opposite Ph.D...

...The Bilharzia bladder cancers of the Nile Valley and Brazil usually figure in the "infection" columns of causal tables, but what does one do with the fact that the two hundred million people exposed to the parasite suffer mainly because they bathe and wash in sewage-contaminated water...

...The Social Construction of Ignorance Ignorance is surely one of the most prominent features of knowledge about cancer in the late twentieth century...

...Strange as it may seem, there is not even a well-defined consensus concerning whether overall cancer rates are on the rise...

...How, in other words, in a discourse dominated by concepts of genetics, germs, lifestyle, and occupation, does one come to grips with cancers caused by chronic poverty, medical neglect, environmental injustice, mediainduced fashions, or industrial malfeaSPRING • 1994 • 221 Breen Politics sance...

...Bias also emerges, however, from the fetishization of certain of the self-avowed idols of conventional science...

...For every American alive today, one in three will contract the disease...

...Five-year survival rates for the majority of cancers (lung, colon, breast, and stomach, for example) remain essentially what they were twenty years ago—despite more than $25 billion spent on research by the National Cancer Institute...

...222 • DISSENT...

...4 The Council for Tobacco Research is one of the largest private supporters of medical research in the world, having spent about $200 million for this purpose since the 1950s, resulting in the publication of more than three thousand scientific articles...

...state-sponsored censorship...

...I traveled to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1992 to examine archives pertaining to the 1879 discovery of the so-called Schneeberger Krankheit (uranium mine-induced lung cancer...

...When is a nation's health or environmental policy (or the absence thereof) the cause of cancer...

...More attention needs to be paid to the ideological uses of science—how light is used to cast confusing shadows...

...Asbestos workers suffer cancers of the lungs and gut...

...The same was true, interestingly, in other countries, such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia, which had their own Huepers and many more victims kept in the dark...

...A very short list would include humoral imbalances, hereditary predispositions, sunshine, obesity, syphilis, female sex hormones, radiation, tomatoes, tarred roads, grief and anxiety, drinking from iron pipes, arsenic, affluence, poverty, sexual abstinence, sexual promiscuity, and water derived from streams in which trout are abundant...

...80/ 100,000) due to the fact that Floridians are, on average, significantly older than Alaskans...

...What, for example, is the connection— if any—between the fact that 90 percent of cancer researchers are males, and that men predominate as subjects in clinical trials for cancer drugs...

...Bias in such cases, though, is more subtle than is commonly imagined...

...How can one of the largest medical efforts in history have proved so futile...

...The Politics Behind What We Know and Don't Know (Basic Books, in press...

...Controversy is often engineered...

...3 Rericha provided me with details on the number of miners and their lung cancer rates, but there was a part of the story that even he didn't know about...

...Seas of Controversy I'm writing a book on what causes cancer— focusing especially on the politics behind what we know and don't know about the disease.* There is controversy virtually everywhere one looks: over the role of life-style and occupation in the genesis of cancer...

...First world poverty is surely one of the most potent of all carcinogens...

...The central questions of what I like to call "political philosophy of science" include the following: 1. Why do we know what we know, and why don't we know what we don't know...

...Environmentalists like Devra Lee Davis argue that brain and several other cancers are rapidly increasing...

...My hope is that by examining how and why such questions have become the objects of controversy, we may learn more about how politics shapes science—and perhaps even more about what really causes cancer and what to do about it...

...This has important consequences for public perceptions of science...

...That year, cancer claimed about 30,000 U.S...

...Cancer is a historical disease in at least two separate senses: theories of what causes cancer change over time, but so do the causes at work in carcinogenesis...

...If physical exercise is one way to prevent breast cancer, why not pin at least some of the deaths on the failure to provide support for female athletics...

...What are the social responsibilities of the cancer theorist or, for that matter, of the social science theorist...

...Tempers run high in such debates, because much is at stake...

...The Japanese vulnerability to stomach cancer—that nation's leading cancer killer—probably derives from their consumption of large amounts of pickled, burned, and high-salt foods cooked with soybean pastes and sauces...

...Norman F. Estrin (New York, 1993), p. 275...

...The poor smoke more than the rich, and high-school dropouts are much more likely to smoke than high school seniors...

...What about the cosmic rays absorbed while flying during sunspot activity, when the radiation one receives in an hour can exceed that allowed for nuclear workers in a year...

...Bias in such efforts does not necessarily mean that the science is bogus: support even of "good science" may assist an industry in deflecting attention from the hazards of a product—as when the Council for Tobacco Research promotes genetics research...

...one can only conclude that Czech authorities feared that revelation of the sacrifice of its miners for Soviet atomic power might not sit well with the Czech populace...

...Percivall Pott, an English physician, described soot-induced scrotal cancer among London's chimney sweeps in 1775—and there is reason now to suspect that the shift from wood to coal as the primary fuel for English cooking and heating was at least partly to blame...

...The story of cancer is not a very upbeat one, and the stables of the research establishment are not exactly clean...

...Washington, D.C...

...But cancer is also historical in the sense that SPRING • 1994 • 215 Green Politics what actually causes cancer changes over time...

...There is a great deal of talk about the "culture of science," but where is there discussion of the "cultivation of ignorance...

...James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix and one of the nation's most widely respected scientists, simply called it "a bunch of shit...

...If the politics of science consists (among other things) in the structure of research priorities, then it is important to understand what gets studied and why, but also what does not get studied and why not...

...We have witnessed the medicalization of environmental protest, so that the fear of living near an environmental hazard is now labeled a mental illness, amid growing talk of things like fiber phobia, fumaphobia, radiophobia, chemophobia, nosophobia, riskophobia, and so forth...

...Although most other diseases are on the decline, cancer is on the rise...

...The manufacture and distribution of uncertainty is, I would suggest, an insufficiently recognized social function of science...

...In 1988, for example, the General Accounting Office estimated that the cost of cleaning up the nation's twenty-eight nuclear bomb plants and testing facilities alone could be as high as $175 billion...

...the second, the power of economic agents to rule you, fool you, and make you rest assured...

...Ignorance is politically constructed by outright censorship (admittedly rare), by failures to fund, by the absence or 220 • DISSENT Green Politics impotence of interested parties, and by efforts to "jam the scientific airwaves with noise...

...today, it is men who die more often than women, and tobacco is the primary cause of this reversal of fortunes...

...The cynicism of such a ban was made apparent in 1970, when the administrative chief of all Czech uranium mining—Karel Bocek— defected to West Germany...

...Skeptics charged the investigators with having ignored the fact that societies such as these may simply not have had the medical services required to evidence death by cancer...

...What are the virtues of looking at ultimate rather than proximate causes, for example, or of seeking prevention rather than cure...

...Hueper protested the order and was thereupon barred from all epidemiological work on occupational cancer, ironically, in the same year that the National Institutes of Health's chief of research— Hueper' s own boss—was trumpeting the freedom of science...

...Cancer of the mouth is common among the peoples of India and southeast Asia, who chew betel nuts and tobacco leaves...

...How bad is it to eat Brazil nuts, the most radioactive natural food, or to dust a baby's bottom with Talcum power, which naturally contains asbestos...

...Fat consumption, linked to colon cancer, usually registers as "diet" ( = life-style)--but what does one make of the fact that people in low-earning jobs are more likely to eat fatty, high-salt, carcinogenic foods...

...Bias in such cases lies typically not in the falsification of research but rather in the diversion of attention from one problem to another—from causes onto mechanisms, for example, or from questions of public health onto questions of free speech...

...Mormons, whose religious beliefs forbid them to smoke or to drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, die of cancer 20 percent less often than do non-Mormons...

...The commercialization of environmental troubles has led to unprecedented stakes in the exaggeration or diminution of environmental hazards, the net result being that experts commonly disagree about what is a hazard and what is a risk...

...When the New England Journal of Medicine published evidence that caffeine causes pancreatic cancer, the National Coffee Association responded with a position paper refuting the charges...

...Epidemiologists face methodological obstacles that often reduce to such practical questions as: how large can I afford to make my study...

...Environmental groups depend to a certain extent on public fears to solicit funds, and manufacturers stand to gain or to lose from whether and to what extent a given chlorinated or halogenated hydrocarbon is judged a public health hazard...

...culminating at 11,816 in 1953...

...Such knowledge as we have of causes, however, has done surprisingly little to aid us in our search for solutions...

...over the role of stress, personality factors, and "natural carcinogens" in things like beer, barbecue, and bruised broccoli...

...Liver cancer is especially common in Africa and in Guam, because the foods in those places are often contaminated with aflatoxin, a potent fungal toxin...

...The search for percentages to be accorded each of these "factors" belies the extent to which occupation is shaped by culture, culture by skills and technologies, technologies by lifestyles, life-styles by infectious possibilities, infectious agents by economic structures, and so forth and so on...

...Medical missionaries and frontier doctors for the rest of the century tried to prove that cancer was absent or rare among the Athapaskans of SPRING • 1994 • 217 Green Politics Canada, the Inuit of the Arctic, the Hunza of the Himalayas, and other purported primitives...

...Animal studies and bacterial bioassays are invoked to solve this problem though these, too, are not without flaws...

...Theories of what causes cancer have included virtually every known vice and every known virtue...

...I say no one knows, but it would be more precise to say that in most such matters there are islands of agreement separated by deep seas of controversy...

...Cancer is caused by bad habits, bad working conditions, bad government, and bad luck, the latter including such things as the luck of the genetic draw and the culture into which one is born.' Geographical and occupational differences give us clues as to what causes cancer...

...Science, public policy, and public opinion are all affected...

...Why, if cancer is so obviously a product of things like smoking, radon, and the "industrial way of life," has so little been done to solve the problem at its roots...

...The trend has been building for some time: Roswell Park, a New York physician, noted as early as 1899 that cancer was "now the only disease which is steadily upon the increase...

...But the outlook is not so sanguine for the really big killers...

...Many such groups have been formed in response to specific regulatory proposals: When the National Academy of Sciences published a review of evidence linking breast and colon cancer to the consumption of meat, the American Meat Institute organized a coalition of dairy, poultry, and livestock associations to discredit the charges...

...Army's $210 million strategic breast initiative somehow comes up with a miraculous cure or even moderately successful treatment, how should one regard the historical neglect of the malady that, for most of human history, has been one of the most deadly forms of cancer...

...Do cellular phones cause brain cancer...

...The famous Joachimsthal mines were reopened by Soviet occupation authorities soon after the Second World War, following a secret agreement of November 23, 1945 that granted the Soviets exclusive rights to all uranium produced in the country...

...Stanford University president Donald Kennedy expressed a somewhat stronger view when he called America's cancer campaign "a medical Vietnam...

...I don't intend all of this to be depressing, though I must confess that I do appreciate what Wilhelm Hueper meant when he characterized his method as "one piece of dirt leading to another...

...Rericha requested and was again refused permission to publish...

...what I found was that more people have died from the disease since the 1950s than in the previous five hundred years of the mines' operation...

...What is going on here...

...The American Hospital Association, for example, based on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, has a staff of 884 and an annual budget of about $79,000,000...