2002 Essays

Cancer as Metaphor: My Experiences in Basic Research 1966 - 1996.

Pollack, Robert

Driven by this dream of total victory after total war, scientists have wrapped cancer research in a variety of military metaphors over the decades. Each change in the scientific agenda of cancer research has been presented as a restatement of this war aim: to kill every last cancer cell. Untethered to the reality of cancer as avoidable, the rhetoric of cancer research has changed as well, always realigning the strategies of the cancer war with the nation's priorities. We have been through three different wars on cancer of this sort and are currently in the midst of a fourth, genetic, war today.