In 2004, cancer will kill 10,000 Americans under the age of 40; about 1,000 will be children age 9 or younger. If Washington truly wanted to wage war on cancer we could do it, and the first obvious step would be to increase funding for the front-line troops. Right now, drug and biotech companies are investing about $6 billion a year in cancer research, according to Fortune magazine. That's $1.2 billion more than the annual budget for the National Cancer Institute, the government's lone deep pocket for cancer science, and $5 billion more than all the major charities combined. A few billion dollars more each year could make a huge difference, saving thousands of lives.

In the last 18 months, taxpayers have given $120 billion to a different war: the invasion and consequent reconstruction of Iraq. By the end of next year, that figure is expected to top $200 billion. That's about three times the total amount given to the NCI by Congress during the 33 years of the war on cancer.

Cancer victims, scientists and the public at large are asking for funding more on a par with a real war. In a USA Today poll published on the front page in 1998, nearly nine in 10 adults surveyed said they would be willing to pay more taxes if the money went toward research for a cancer cure. Four years earlier, Sens. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Mark Hatfield of Oregon had proposed legislation for a 1 percent tax on health insurance premiums to create a medical research trust fund to subsidize disease research. Insurance lobbyists defeated it.

Last year, in a bipartisan survey of 1,000 Americans conducted by pollsters who have worked for President Bush and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, cancer ranked as the public's greatest fear, greater than AIDS, heart disease, car accidents or even acts of terrorism. Two-thirds favored adding billions of dollars each year to the NCI budget; about half wanted to double or triple its budget.

"There is an epidemic of cancer in this country and we are doing damn little about it in the way of public funds," says Hamilton Jordan, a cancer survivor and chief of staff in the Carter White House. "There is no way to understand it or to justify it."

With substantial government investment, scientists say, more research proposals -- like Mallery's -- would be publicly funded and owned; there could be additional patent and financial incentives for research on the hundreds of minor cancers that go ignored because little is offered in the way of profit; the veils of secrecy that hide clinical trials from the public would be lifted, allowing for the recruitment of more trial patients; and scientific collaboration could be the standard rather than the exception.

Simply, if science were loosed from Wall Street's leash, its assault on cancer might rain down like bombs on Baghdad.

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Science's advance on cancer is notoriously slow. That's why, in 1971, a war on it was launched from the nation's capital with a political promise of victory by the U.S. bicentennial. In 2004, more than a quarter century past that improbable deadline, at least 550,000 Americans will die from cancer, while the age-adjusted death rate from cancer remains only marginally improved from 1970.

Today, the war on cancer is at a crossroads. Armed with the emerging science of the publicly funded Human Genome Project, researchers are examining cancer anew. Cancer was once an umbrella term grouping together what were believed to be 100 to 200 diseases unique for their organ location -- lung, liver, breast, prostate. Now it is being redefined, subdivided into vastly more varieties by advanced research.

There may be thousands of cancers distinguishable only by subtle genetic differences, says Howard Hughes scientist Druker. "Each has its Achilles' heel and we have to identify that Achilles' heel in every cancer. Imagine if we could very rapidly sequence the genomes of several hundred of each of the common cancers. It might take a long time and cost billions of dollars, but with today's technology it is possible."

But after Congress began doubling the National Institutes of Health budget in the late 1990s -- and the NCI's budget for basic science ballooned to vet the early promise of some cancer drugs -- industry attached itself like barnacles to cancer research. As companies invested, they claimed proprietary rights to the results of their research. The effect was double-edged: New and expensive cancer drugs offer negligible benefits while the war is weighted down with patent strategies, intellectual property rights and a collective fixation on NASDAQ.

The ruckus that scientists are beginning to raise about the problem is one of a few hopeful signs. The government official who oversees the cancer-war arsenal admits that the conduct of the war is flawed, but says that the very admission is a move in the right direction.

"One has to recognize the problem before taking concrete steps," says Dr. Richard Pazdur, director of oncology drugs for the Food and Drug Administration. "People are finally talking about this, and people have realized the problem. That is the first step."

A review of 78 federal court cases dating to 1962 that deal primarily with oncology and the scientific scuffling among researchers, universities and industry found that nearly 80 percent, or 61 cases, have occurred since 1998, indicating that the struggle to control the fruits of research has become substantially more litigious in recent years. More telling, perhaps, is how the tenor of the lawsuits changed in the 1990s. Straightforward claims of patent infringement became crowded with charges of racketeering and intellectual theft.

"It is sometimes hard to decide who is wearing the white and who the black hat," says Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, director of Duke University's Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy. "And a lot of folks are trading hats of different shades during the day."

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