[STEVE] INSKEEP: Is the world we live in today, in terms of cancer, different than the world was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago?
Dr. MUKHERJEE: Absolutely. First of all, it’s biologically different, because we understand cancer in a very fundamentally different way. I think we know now that cancer is an extremely complex disease, perhaps among the most complex diseases that we face, and it has multiple faces.
And there’s very little in the field that calls for a universal cure for cancer, in the sense that one might have imagined in the 1960s and 1970s. So there’s biologically it’s a complete different world. We understand a cancer cell in a much deeper way than we did 20, 30 years ago.
And of course, politically, it’s changed. We now have poured in an enormous amount of resources into cancer. The National Cancer Institute Project, you know, runs about $5 billion a year. That’s a large amount of money, but let’s not be grandiose about the amount of money we’re actually spending on a problem that is attacking us at the most fundamental level of the human species.