The Fortune article was titled “Cancer: The Great Darkness,” and the “darkness,” the authors suggested, was as much political as medical. Cancer medicine was stuck in a rut not only because of the depth of medical mysteries that surrounded it, but because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: “There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000.… The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to
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