6 November 2022: The American Cancer Society has changed its mission statement

The American Cancer Society has updated its mission statement, which now reads:

The mission of the American Cancer Society is to improve the lives of people with cancer and their families through advocacy, research, and patient support, to ensure everyone has an opportunity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer. See https://www.cancer.org/about-us/who-we-are/mission-statements.html

The prior mission statement was “to save lives, celebrate lives, and lead the fight for a world without cancer.” 

I don't know the details regarding the change, but I am pleased with this new, more rational mission statement that reflects that cancer is an inherent part of our biology that cannot be vanquished. I had previously criticized the "world without cancer":

The human body is composed of a myriad of interacting networks positioned at critical states, which is required for network flexibility to enable embryonic development, the inflammatory response to trauma and infection and the capability for our species to evolve to a changing environment. However, the tradeoff for maintaining these critical states is that cancer, a type of catastrophic systemic failure, is inevitable. We can reduce its incidence, we can detect it earlier and we can treat it more effectively but attaining a “world without cancer” (American Cancer Society, accessed 13Nov20) is not possible.

Originally posted on 14 November 2020 at 

https://natpernickshealthblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/14/39/, 

reposted at https://www.pathologyoutlines.com/ccnblog/reductionismvscomplexity.html\