Book Review

摘要

This book discusses a remarkable episode in the century-long American effort to find a cure for cancer, the second leading cause of death in the country, by focusing on the governmental initiative in biomedical policy known as the ‘War on Cancer’ (a legislative Act passed by Congress and ratified by the US president in December 1971 which provided approximately $100 million in new funding and a reorganisation of the National Cancer Institute). The search or ‘hunt’ for cancer viruses was central to this policy, which developed in the shadow of the spectacular success with vaccines against the polio virus in the 1950s. However, the War on Cancer ended up in a spectacular failure, as a ‘medical Vietnam’ (p. 204), being disbanded in 1978, or only seven years after its inception. This book not only seeks to clarify the rise and the fall of the War on Cancer in the 1970s, but also labours to persuade us that the ‘infrastructure’ created by the War on Cancer at great cost (or a cost which came at the expense of other, possibly more efficient, approaches to combat cancer, such as refining new clinical approaches and uncovering possible environmental causal factors) was not in vain. Rather, the book argues that ‘infrastructure’ (i.e. the ensemble of objects and actors mobilised by the War on Cancer in the form of large-scale, coordinated programmes involving scientists, administrators, labs, lab animals, materials, supplies and conferences) helped speed the response to the discovery of oncogenes (genes that can cause cancer if activated) in the 1980s. This series of discoveries, but especially the oncoproteins which were also discovered as part of this paradigm, were seen as both a ‘biological revolution’ and a new, more successful, molecular approach to cure cancer, for example by manipulating such oncoproteins. Since molecular medicine is the most recent and most promising approach to many diseases, including cancer, the book seeks to counteract the public memory of the War on Cancer as a spectacular failure (its hunt for cancer viruses ended without finding any target) by crediting it with the rise of molecular medicine in the 1980s and the 1990s.