In his valedictory State of the Union address this January, President Obama endorsed Vice President Biden’s proposal of last October that the US needed something like a “moonshot” to cure cancer. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done,” Obama said. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.” The loved one I lost was my mother. At the age of sixty-seven, she developed breast cancer.

Source: Cancer: A Time for Skeptics by Jerome Groopman | The New York Review of Books