TOW #15 - Why Curing Cancer is Not a 'Moonshot'

Just this past week, President Barack Obama gave the final State of the Union address of his presidency.  In this speech, Obama called for America to be the country that finally, and completely, eradicates cancer.  This statement comes after Vice President Joe Biden lost a son to cancer this past year, bringing the goal of finding a cure to the forefront of the president's mind.  In Jeffrey Kluger's article, he makes the argument that finding a cure for cancer, although the prospect exciting, is an unrealistically worded argument that is nearly impossible to comprehend.  The room certainly exploded with applause when Obama proclaimed this challenge to the country, but when taken a closer look at, the difficulties begin to arise.  Through analogies with past events, Kluger is able to portray the argument that curing cancer is actually a much bigger and more threatening challenge than most people would believe.  The title, "Why Curing Cancer is Not a 'Moonshot'" compares the challenge to the actual 'moonshot' of placing a human being on the moon, one of the biggest challenges, and successes, of the 20th century.  However, when comparing curing cancer to a 'moonshot', Kluger makes the argument that "there will be perhaps 1.6 million Americans diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. alone this year, and each of those cases will be in some ways unique."  In this way, comparing a 'moonshot' to curing cancer is the same as having to put a man on the moon more than 1.6 million times (in a year), and having to do it in more than 1.6 million ways.  In no way are these two challenges comparable.  Even a closer comparison, such as that of eradicating Polio once and for all, doesn't begin to cover the complexity of cancer as a whole.  Therefore, although a positive and optimistic goal, Kluger finishes his essay by stating the difficulty that focusing on such a large and nearly impossible goal has.  By only focusing on the biggest goal/success of curing capital-c-Cancer, it "will only make us fail to notice the smaller, more incremental ones [successes] when they come."