PRAEGER, MARCH 2017It’s hard to believe that something like cancer, which doesn’t care about your party affiliation, could have a partisan tinge to it. And yet Proctor, in his book Cancer Wars, argues that politics itself has been an integral factor in cancer funding and prevention efforts. His history suggests that ideologically influenced administrations, including those of the Carter and Reagan presidencies, had significant effects on cancer prevention and funding. Consistent with the overall regulatory cuts suffered under the Reagan administration, Proctor details how environmental prevention efforts in the form of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations were dramatically scaled back from Carter-era levels.
This work suggests that although politicians of all stripes may in principle support the idea of curing cancer or supporting cancer research, there are embedded issues in cancer policy that lend themselves to party politics. These elements include budgetary and regulatory politics, as well as general attitudes toward science policies. To begin with general attitudes toward science, again, it does not instantly strike many of us that supporting science would be a political football to be tossed about. And yet, Democrats and Republicans have strikingly different attitudes not only about science, but also about different types of science. For example, space policy, decisions about whether and when to send humans into outer space, has been shown to be a Republican issue. Why would space be ...
