From the Editor.
by Neil Caudle
We borrowed the photos on the cover [the print edition, at right] from coworkers in our office and from others we see every day. We talked about the kind of story we were writing, and people brought us the photographs—pulled them out of picture frames and albums, places of honor in their homes.
Not everyone told us a story, but some did. One woman described how cancer grabbed her big, strapping father by the arm and then took the rest. We heard about people who lingered and suffered; we heard about people consumed in a matter of days. We heard about addictions to alcohol, cigarettes. And we thought about how our nation has spent many billions of dollars searching for treatments and cures, but cancer and addiction still invade every family, touch every life. All of us will die of something. Let it be anything other than this.
Let’s have a deadline. Next week would be fine, but that’s dreaming. Let’s look a little farther out, to the year 2050. I won’t be around, but my kids will, and many of your children will be, and they’ll be approaching the stages of life when the odds are no longer in their favor. For their sake, time’s up.
We don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Medical science is a marvelous thing. Over the two decades after I finished high school, my expected life span increased by about three years, and all I had to do was pay my taxes. I may live to play catch with my grandchildren. And, according to the National Science Foundation, improvements in health, as measured by the economic value of added longevity, are at least 50 times what we spend on research, and eliminating cancer would be worth roughly $47 trillion.
But no one who lent us a photograph talked about the economics. They just don’t want their family, or anyone else’s family, to live under threat from a nasty, insidious disease. So we have put some of our top scientists on the spot. We asked them to imagine their science in the year 2050. Tell us, please, that you’ll have this thing solved. The question really wasn’t fair, but they understood. They have families, too.
