The word resurrection implies a burial, and since the Fortune article of 1937, composite assessments of the War on Cancer had virtually been buried—oddly, in an overwhelming excess of information. Every minor footfall and every infinitesimal step had been so obsessively reported in the media that it had become nearly impossible to discern the trajectory of the field as a whole. In part, Cairns was reacting to the overgranularity of the view from the prior decade. He wanted to pull away from the details and offer a bird’s-eye view. Were patients with cancer surviving longer in general? Had the
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