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June 28, 2007
Funding Singles to Make the Home Runs in Cancer Research Possible
Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics interviewed surgeon and author Atul Gawande and asked Gawande his views on a cure for cancer:
Well, there won’t be one cure. Cancer is in fact many diseases: a breast cancer is not the same as a skin cancer is not the same as a cervical cancer. So there will be many cures and the breakthroughs will come incrementally. We now cure 70% of cancers. I suspect we will gradually push that number upward through a combination of better prevention (the HPV vaccine is just one example), better treatments for specific cancers, and better detection of cancers when they are small and most easily cured.
Our work at Golfers Against Cancer is funding research which brings incremental progress important in finding an ultimate cure or method of detection. Incremental implies "slow and plodding" to some, yet it is anything but.
Successful research is a series of building blocks of knowledge, gained through trial and error of multiple projects. This progressive gain in knowledge and insight into the behaviors of a particular cancer leads to those "ah ha" moments that researchers--and the rest of us--live for. Thanks to better research techniques and technologies, along with improved communications between researchers themselves, breakthroughs are now coming faster. They don't come, however, without steady, cumulative progress over time.
It's similar to baseball. While home runs may bring fans to their feet and receive the favored treatment when game highlights are shown on television, singles drive baseball. If you look at the top ten hit leaders of all time in major league baseball, seven of those ten are among the career leaders in singles. Without singles, it would be pretty hard for those sluggers to win the game with a three run homer or a grand slam.
The projects we fund at Golfers Against Cancer may seem small and insignificant. In fact, they are the singles which make the home runs possible.
By the way, the rest of the brief interview with Gawande is worth your time; Gawande is a talented writer whose most recent book is Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance.
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