President Obama in his State of the Nation address in January 2016 announced a "Moonshot" effort to beat cancer. His vice-president Joe Biden is in charge of mission control, and for Biden, it's personal - his son Beau died from brain cancer last year at the age of 46. But there's a sense of déjà-vu about this new Moonshot - President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971.
More than 40 years later, clearly the war is still not won - but what has it achieved?

GP Dr Graham Easton tells the story of philanthropist Mary Lasker whose campaigning influenced Nixon to start his War on Cancer. He hears how the Cancer Plan brought in mathematicians and physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and for NASA to find cures for cancer. Curing cancer turned out to be a much harder problem than landing men on the moon.

Graham Easton looks back at the treatments available in the 1970s and asks if the War on Cancer lead to improved therapies.
In the last forty years the outlook for some cancers, such as childhood leukaemia and testicular cancer, has improved markedly, but would these developments have happened without Nixon's campaign? Show less