Chemotherapy has been used to fight cancer since the 1940s, radiotherapy was pioneered almost a century ago, and surgeons have been removing tumours in order to save lives for much longer. While these familiar-sounding treatments are still widely used today, they now look vastly different, are more successful and cause fewer side effects. So while one measure of progress in cancer research is that more people survive the disease – since the early 1970s, mortality rates for all cancers combined have decreased by around a fifth in the UK – another is that treatments can be less gruelling. The even more encouraging news is that, with the help of gifts left in wills to Cancer Research UK, all this progress is part of a trajectory still heading full-throttle towards an even greater understanding of the disease and, one day, the possibility of beating it.
