The world is winning the war on cancer

In 1971 Richard Nixon, then America's president, announced a "war on cancer".

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Just two years earlier the Apollo programme had combined big science and big government to put astronauts on the moon, so hopes were high. Some optimistic doctors talked of a cure for cancer within a few years.

They were wrong. Today every adult has had cancer, knows someone who has, or both. Half of men and a third of women in rich countries can expect to suffer from it at some point in their lives. In America, where it is the second-most-common cause of death, just behind heart disease, it kills around 600,000 people a year. Worldwide, it is responsible for about one in six of all deaths. If your criterion for success was a cure within a decade or even two or three or four-then you might conclude that the war on cancer has been lost.

In fact, things are better than many realize. The progress is plain from the data and there is every reason to think it will continue. Cancer is related to age. If you strip out longer lifespans, it becomes clear that in the rich world the early 1990s were an inflection point. Since then, the age-adjusted death rate has been falling, slowly but steadily, year after year. In America the rate is now about a third lower than in the 1990s. The trend is similar in other developed countries.

What some scientists hoped would be a blitzkrieg has turned out to be a steady but successful war of attrition. Some victories have been spectacular. Childhood leukaemia used to be virtually a death sentence; now it has a five-year survival rate above 90%. Yet because cancer is not one illness, but a whole category, much of the progress has come not from big breakthroughs, but thousands of smaller advances in screening, surgery and drugs.