I found these points from the article rather shocking:
"One in three Americans will develop cancer in their lifetime."
"We have made virtually no progress in extending survival for patients with metastatic solid organ tumors since the “War on Cancer” was declared over 40 years ago."
"For the most part, when a patient has metastatic cancer today, the likelihood of living 10 more years is virtually unchanged from 40 years ago."
"Since 1971, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort."
"In 2012 cancer killed an estimated 577,190 people in the United States. The death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950. And most of this decline is due to mammography screening in breast cancer and cessation of smoking, resulting in less lung cancer in men."
I'd speculate that is because what is being fought is the tumerous growth and not the cause. Chemotherapy, radiation and surgically removing tumors is an attempt at fixing the symptom. The cause for the tumor is (probably) at molecular level, which we can't properly manipulate.
Some [1] even suggest it might be a """computational""" problem, as the cell loses information about what it's supposed to do. This encompasses not only "classical" information in the DNA base pairs but there is also research going into quantum information being stored in DNA.
"One in three Americans will develop cancer in their lifetime."
"We have made virtually no progress in extending survival for patients with metastatic solid organ tumors since the “War on Cancer” was declared over 40 years ago."
"For the most part, when a patient has metastatic cancer today, the likelihood of living 10 more years is virtually unchanged from 40 years ago."
"Since 1971, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort."
"In 2012 cancer killed an estimated 577,190 people in the United States. The death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950. And most of this decline is due to mammography screening in breast cancer and cessation of smoking, resulting in less lung cancer in men."