This is the first draft of an editorial I have been asked to write about why we do not have a national screening policy. When the final version is ready, I wil repost it here.

What does it take?
One person's opinion.
By Brian Hill

This year cancer replaced heart disease as the number one killer of Americans. Since the official war on cancer was declared by President Nixon in 1972, progress has been made, but clearly not enough. Huge leaps in knowledge such as the mapping of the human genome, which we thought would yield the clues to scientific breakthroughs, have instead left us with the knowledge that cancer is not just a couple of pathology types, but literally hundreds of unique diseases. The more we find out, it is clearer the less we know. That does not mean that progress has not been made, just not progress that has yielded the breakthrough that will finally label cancer a manageable and survivable disease. To put this in perspective, the annual budget for cancer research in the US alone is over 5 billion dollars per year (requests of an additional 4.2 billion over the next 5 years were made this year by the NCI), in spite of this enormous expenditure and effort, one person dies of cancer every minute of every day in the US