(Virginia Quarterly Online) – But buried beneath this evergreen drama of illness and cure, the promise of miracle biotech breakthroughs and heroic survivorship, is the story of how American business interests helped to steer politicians away from stopping the cancer epidemic at the source; how they helped to generate a mania for curing the disease and obstructed the analytic and moral clarity required to prevent it. Actually preventing cancer—far preferable to curing it, if less interesting—would mean asking why our cancer rates are so high in the first place.

It might make more sense to think about the promise to cure cancer less at the level of discursive logic and more as the inscription of a ritual, as an incantation or part of a liturgy. The cycle of repetition and failure has enriched this faith rather than eroded it, the way some cult leaders only consolidate their grip when the date they have predicted for the rapture comes and goes. This would be charming if it wasn’t so deadly. (Read More)