How Goes the War?

There's an article at The Atlantic titled "More Money Won't Win the War on Cancer". I agree with the title, although it's worth remembering that lack of money will certainly lose it. Money, in basic research, is very much in the "necessary but not sufficient" category. The article itself is making the case of a book by Clifton Leaf, The Truth in Small Doses, a project that started with this article in Fortune in 2004. Here's the pitch: What if a lack of research funding isn’t really the problem? One reason we aren’t making faster progress against cancer, according to Leaf, is because the federal grant process often chases the brightest minds from academic labs, and for those who do stay, favors low-risk “little questions” over swinging for the fences. “More money by itself is not going to solve anything,” Leaf said. “Let’s say we doubled the [National Institutes of Health] budget, that isn’t going to make the lives of researchers better.” The problem, as Leaf sees it, is with the business of cancer research. Over the last decade or so, “doing science” has reached a crisis stage—a claim many in the cancer community agree with, even if they don’t quite see eye-to-eye with Leaf on all of his conclusions. His take is that the grant-money situation is making academic researchers spend more and more time just trying to get (or stay) funded, and that they tend to avoid anything that might sound a bit unusual in their applications. He also fears that ...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs