Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care - Softcover

Hasan, Nafis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1945335181 ISBN 13: 9781945335181

Verlag: Common Notions, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A bold rethinking of cancer as a biological phenomenon, an indictment of science that serves capitalism, and a radical vision of liberated health and well-being.

More than fifty years after the declaration of the War on Cancer, we are nowhere closer to victory. The problem lies in the way cancer is understood and the “cancer-industrial complex” that has been established to address it. The cancer-industrial complex arises from the symbiosis of private corporations, nonprofit organizations such as universities and foundations, and public governmental regulatory bodies in the post-genomic era. This network profits off a vulnerable population who exist in a market that is structurally rigged against them given their physical and socioeconomic conditions. Under the auspices of scientific research and technological progress, much of which is well-meaning, a critical extortion takes place.

Metastasis brings the cancer-industrial complex to the fore of our understanding of what cancer is, the chronic nature of the disease, its unmistakable parallels to capitalism, its inextricable link to the neoliberal model of economic development, and its disproportionate burden on nonwhite and poor populations—and what it will really take to rid ourselves of the gravest dangers to our individual and collective well-being.

Trained as a cancer scientist, Nafis Hasan offers a critical and clinical reading of current narratives of cancer research and the conditions that put the onus on the individual rather than our collective efforts to prevent cancer incidence and deaths. He offers a visionary alternative theory about carcinogenesis—one countering the dominant neoliberal idea of mutations causing cancer—and centers a dialectical approach to understanding the biology and sociology of cancer. Hasan states, “If we must fight the longest war, then it should be the war against capitalism, whose growth has metastasized in every aspect of our society and ourselves.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nafis Hasan received his PhD in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Tufts University in 2019.  He is currently an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. His writings have appeared in Jacobin, Science for the People, The Trouble, and more. He serves as an editor for the radical science magazine Science for the People and South Asian left media platform Jamhoor, and organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America.

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Every year, February 4th marks World Cancer Day, a day that “unites the world’s population in the fight against cancer.” In the US, every month of the year is designated as “[insert cancer type] awareness month”; given the number of cancer types exceeds the number of months, some of the more common types end up sharing the spotlight. In each of these months, and specific days, hundreds, if not thousands, will don their requisite T-shirts or ribbons––pink, blue, yellow––and participate in walks, runs, bike rides, charity events, dinner galas, and more, with the ambit of spreading awareness regarding this deadly group of diseases. Cancer, long broken out of the boundaries of the medical realm, now permeates every crack of our social, economic, political and even the metaphysical fabrics of society, influencing the evolution of these spaces as they relate to the human body. More succinctly, as the anthropologist S. Lachlann Jain said: “cancer is a total social fact.”

Cancer is a disease of the ages. Before it became the common household specter, it had been documented as early as 2500 BC by the Egyptian physician Imhotep; he had written about “a bulging mass in the breast” in one of his case studies. Two millennia later, the Greek historian Herodotus described a breast tumor afflicting Atossa, daughter of the emperor Darius. Over the ages, more indications of cancer’s existence before modern medicine were unearthed, from tomes, bones, letters, and personal diaries; the affliction seemed to be circulating mostly among the upper strata of society. It is likely that this was more an issue of access to care and diagnosis, as later the disease would become more visible among those who are ignored and avoided, such as the chimney sweeps in London in early 1900s who would later develop testicular cancers.

The rise in cancer incidence over the decades is a confluence of advancements in diagnostic technology, social health movements pushing for more awareness, increased longevity thanks to modern medicine, and the ills that accompanied industrialization and their lingering effects. In 2023, the American Cancer Society (ACS) estimated that close to 2 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed, with more than 600,000 deaths. There’s been a steady increment in the rate of cancer incidence since 1975 with the rates stabilizing around 1995, per ACS’ data. The good news is that with increasing cancer rates, cancer death rates are falling––overall death rates have fallen by 33 percent from its peak in 1991.

This falling death rate, at first glance, would indicate that we must be slowly, but surely, getting closer to beating cancer. Cancer’s rise as a disease of concern within the US occurred in incremental steps, until the declaration of the War on Cancer in 1971, as a culmination of years of efforts by public figures, scientists, doctors, socialites and of course, the victims and their families. Following World War I, where weapons of mass destruction were imported from the trenches to the laboratories for waging war within the human body against rogue cells, new treatment modalities also spurred the notion that cancer would be cured if only there was more money to fund the research efforts. Nixon’s overture to the public to conduct the War on Cancer, ironically to save face from the atrocities of the losing Vietnam War, then set the stage for an all-out effort to eradicate cancer. If the US was able to split the atom, the building block of all things imaginable, then what are some rogue cells to the might of this nation?

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Common Notions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1945335181
• ISBN 13: 9781945335181
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland