The Truth in Small Doses: Why We're Losing the War on Cancer-and How to Win It Book

In a provocative, eye-opening, and ultimately inspiring history of the war on cancer, a celebrated expert asks why we are losing the battle and how to find victory.

Over the past half-century, deaths from heart disease, stroke, and so many other killers have fallen dramatically. But cancer continues to kill with abandon. In 2013, despite a four-decade "war" against the disease that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 1.6 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer and nearly 600,000 will die from it.

In an acclaimed investigative article for Fortune magazine in 2004, Clifton Leaf, then the magazine's executive editor and a cancer survivor himself, asked why we had made such limited progress fighting this terrifying disease. The answer turned out to be shocking. As Leaf discovered, the failure was largely due to what he calls a dysfunctional "cancer culture"—"a groupthink that pushes tens of thousands of physicians and scientists toward the goal of finding the tiniest improvements in treatment rather than genuine breakthroughs; that fosters isolated (and redundant) problem solving instead of cooperation; and rewards academic achievement and publication over all else."

Nine years in the making, this gripping narrative reveals why the public's immense investment in research has been badly misspent, why scientists seldom collaborate and share their data, why new drugs are so expensive yet routinely fail, and why our best hope for progress—brilliant young scientists—are now abandoning the search for a cure. The Truth in Small Doses is that rare tale that will both outrage readers and inspire conversation and change.