400 RüdigerKunow
As documented above, unlike the successes against heart disease and
stroke, the war on cancer, after almost forty years, must be deemed a
failure with a few notable exceptions (Watson 2009). Why?... In my
view the principal problem is that we just do not understand the causes
of most cancers. We don't even know if the problem is genetic or
epigenetic or something totally unknown.... The pharmaceutical
industry cannotmake real progress until weunderstand the mechanisms
and molecular causes of cancer so that industrial, academic, and
governmental scientists have rational targets for intervention. We will
makenoprogressiftherearefivehundredormoregeneticabnormalities
inasinglecancercell.(Spectorn.pag.)In the light of such evidence, proclamations of a "War on Cancer"
are indeed that, declarations, performative speech acts, even ideological
ones in the sense that they do not enact or produce what they say.
Rather,theytendtoobscurethefactthatno"militarysolution"isinthis
casefeasibleandthat,foronce,neithertheproverbial"silverbullet"nor
moneywilldothetrick.
Whatthemilitaryrhetoricfurthermoreobscuresisthatcancer,which
seemssomuchthesignatureillnessofthe20thcentury,isindeedoneof
the world's oldest known pathologies. Already Hippocrates (ca. 460 to
ca. 370 BCE) seems to have been familiar with the disease; in fact, we
owe the word cancer (καρκινος, Greek for "crab") to him. Since that
time, symptoms which are today linked to various cancers have been
continuously noted and reflected upon by writers and medics. In the
1920s and 1930s in the United States, cancer moved to the forefront of
public attention, partly because by that time it had become the nation's
secondmostcommonmedicalkiller,justafterheartdisease(Mukherjee
24).
This is not to rehearse the hoary cultural cliché that cancer kills
"indiscriminately;" the idea of the impartial killer, vanquishing alike
young and old,^94 rich and poor, is a piece of (American) folklore, no
(^94) Against widespread assumptions, cancer is not related to age in a causative
way(Mukherjee44,230);itisratheranunwelcomeby-productofthelongevity
revolution produced by the medical sector and by better health care: "as we
extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth.. ."
(6).