27 May 2016 - Ever since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, American politicians have promised “moonshots” — huge programs, stocked with technology and experts, to solve presumably intractable problems.

A common target is cancer: Earlier this year President Obama announced the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, a $1 billion program led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But cancer isn’t space travel. The growing cancer epidemic is not a problem that medical science is about to solve. In fact, it is a problem we are about to make worse. The better we get at keeping people alive, the older they will get, and the more cancer there will be in the population. How we deal with this paradox will shape the future of society, and our leaders need to understand why.

Mr. Obama isn’t the first president to promise a cancer moonshot. In 1971 Richard M. Nixon made a very similar appeal to conquer the disease with “the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon.” Since then, the war on cancer has been fought on every front and with every means imaginable. Over 40 years the National Cancer Institute alone has spent more than $90 billion on research and treatment.

For more details, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/opinion/obamas-pointless-cancer-moonshot.html?emc=edit_th_20160527&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=20088616&_r=0