Working Paper - The morality of markets and the business of cancer: uncovering the role of the medical establishment and big pharma in the United States

It is a fact that allopathic medicine has failed to find a cure for mankind’s greatest scourge for as long as we’ve suffered the disease. The public appear to be resigned to the drip feed of mostly bad news (punctuated by the occasional hopeful sound bite) that emerges from the media. The narrative that there is no cure for cancer on the horizon has become a dogma that goes largely unchallenged by the general public, medical practitioners and cancer patients themselves. Is such a sustained failure – despite the trillions of dollars thrown at ‘cancer research’ in some of the world’s most prestigious universities and laboratories over decades – really the result of the scale of the challenge or is something else at work? This project seeks to research and uncover how over approximately the last century today’s delivered medicine has been influenced and formed. It will look closely and rather uniquely at singular and determined private interest that of itself, and by harnessing public governance, may very well have distorted one of the largest and most important areas of society and the economy. (Taken from Introduction)