I was listening to the journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News last week as he talked briefly about his wife’s ongoing cancer treatment.  His short gloss was directly on point, and it motivated me to dig deep in my archives on the history of research on breast cancer and how one never knows what scientific knowledge is “useful” until it is. [1]  Grim’s message, that current cuts enacted across the board will severely damage health in the United States, is especially important for our time.

Cancer has been understood as the unregulated growth of tumors and their spread (metastasis) for a long time.  Theodor Boveri wrote Concerning the Origin of Malignant Tumors in 1914:

Theodor Boveri’s Zur Frage der Entstehung maligner Tumoren has had a momentous impact on cancer research.  In it he argues that malignancy arises as a consequence of chromosomal abnormalities and that multiplication is an inherent

Keep reading this article on Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith) - Blog.