/Lung Before cigarettes came
into vogue, this malady was rare.
Today, it kills more than 150,
Americans a year. But regular
CT scans for smokers, which
doctors use to identify tumors
early, save thousands of lives
annually. A decline in smoking
rates, from 40 to 14 percent over
the last 50 years, has helped too.CHARTED
WINTER 2020in remission
BAR CHART+FOR MUCH OF THE 20TH CENTURY,
cancer was an unspeakable diagnosis. Doctors
often wouldn’t tell patients about their illness
because they generally couldn’t treat it, and
they considered it unethical to take away a per-
son’s hope. The equation began to shift when
Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer
Act in 1971, authorizing hundreds of millions
of dollars in research funding. Today, while the
overall number of cases is increasing (we livelonger and are less likely to die from other dis-
eases), biologists and oncologists have made
some incredible strides. New screening tech-
niques, genomic sequencing, and tactics like
immunotherapy and stem cell treatments have
saved lives. There’s still work ahead—Black
men in particular are more likely to die from
many major cancers than their white counter-
parts—but zooming in on a selection of these
malignancies shows how far we’ve come.10 WINTER 2020 / POPSCI.COMBYELEANOR CUMMINS /
ILLUSTRATION BY IN-HOUSE INT.least deadly
SOURCE: AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETYmost deadly