"The researchers are always announcing fantastic progress and breakthroughs -- and the patients are still getting sick and dying. The people who are announcing cancer breakthroughs, I'd like them to walk through the cancer ward ... you see all these thin and kind of desperate patients."
Michael Pollak, oncologist, treatment researcher, McGill University

 Battle for the cure. Four small words and just about anyone can guess what the phrase refers to.

We know that medical scientists around the world are working on any number of experiments and research projects, hopeful that someone, some day, will discover some truly ground-breaking formulas or experience an amazing epiphany that will lead to the cure of cancer. Not that simple; cancer is what we call that mad cell-division process but it takes many different forms, attacking many parts of the body.

We live with our tightly clasped illusions, even when we permit them to delude us. Because in them lies hope. That there will be a momentous discovery that will change countless lives and allow people to live to graceful old age without suffering the scourge of cancer, that dread word that transfixes people, making them incapable -- when the word is used as a diagnosis, more like a death sentence -- of hearing, of assimilating anything else the diagnosing physician may have to say.

In research there will be a cure. More people give to cancer research than likely any other medical condition. In the U.S. the National Cancer Institute has given out close to $100-billion dollars for research funding in the 40 years of its existence. Cancer-research spending in Canada in 2009 alone was $545-million, according to the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance. Compare that to spending on cardiovascular disease, the next heart-stopping diagnosis, at $100-million.

The statistics on cancer are not warmly received anywhere. An estimated 186,000 Canadians were diagnosed in 2012, and there were 75,000 deaths in that year alone in the country from cancer. The rate of new cases per capita has risen to 456 per 100,000. Deaths stand at 50% higher than they were two decades earlier. But the mortality rate per capita has dropped to 184 per 100,000, from 243.

Attributable mostly to lifestyle change. The most significant of which is smoking cessation. Causing far fewer deadly lung cancers. "I think the most important cancer research of the 20th Century by far was the discovery of the smoking association. It wiped out one-third of cancers", said Jack Siemiaty6cki, cancer epidemiologist, University of Montreal. "It's been a very, very chaotic process of looking for cancer cures, and it's not been tremendously successful. There have been successes, but it's a modest success story."

For some patients, with some cancers, the prognosis appears far better now than four decades earlier. Childhood leukemia, once a death sentence now sees an 80% survival rate, while Hodgkin's disease is practically curable. Some major adult cancers, like breast and prostate can be treated successfully now, when caught in their early stages.

Pharmaceutical companies are driven to find treatments that will reduce malignancy and prolong life. Certainly not because they have a wish to deliver humankind from the dreadful consequences of ill fortune in having cancer to complicate one's life, but to gain further wealth from the medical misfortunes of a large proportion of any population, presenting with an assured, ongoing demographic that will require these 'miracle' drugs.

A group of oncologists at New York's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center refused to prescribe Zaltrap for late-stage colorectal cancer because its $11,000 monthly pricetag was twice that of the older drug Avastin. And neither could claim huge success, extending survival of the afflicted by 2.4 months on average.