Foreword

In 1971, President Richard Nixon famously committed the intellectual and technological might of the USA to its great “war on cancer,” signing in the National Cancer Act and making eradication of the disease both a national imperative and an international cause célèbre. Other than the space race, few if any peace-time endeavours have consumed such prodigious resources over such a protracted time-scale. Yet 40+ years and billions of dollars later, cancer still kills over one third of all people in what some fondly call the “developed” world. To many, this manifest failure is inexplicable and to a small fringe clear evidence that a cure has been found but is being suppressed for some nefarious end by an international conspiracy of governments and pharmaceutical companies. After all, rumours routinely circulate of natural products or extracts with amazing anti-cancer therapeutic efficacy but whose use is, for some unfathomable reason, shunned by the Western medical elite. The truth, however, is far less sensational but far more intriguing: cancers have emerged as an unexpectedly complex and diverse ensemble of diseases driven by mutations in processes that lie at the heart of the fundamental questions of biology – how cells, tissues and organisms self-build, self-assemble, self-maintain and self-repair. To comprehend cancer is no less daunting a task than comprehending the very organizational principles that underpin biology.