Michael H. Bachmann, M.D., Sc.D.
Saturday, July 28, 2012

Dr. Bachmann received his M.D. from the J. Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and his doctorate in virology from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. He is currently working as a research scientist at Stanford University on the molecular genetics of tumor immune escape and transplant tolerance.

Chances are that you and your loved ones have been touched by cancer during the last five decades that the "War on Cancer" has been going on for. Still, mortality rates have changed only insignificantly for the majority of cancer types while incidence rates for a number of cancers have continued to grow. In fact, cancer is, and has been for a long time, the second most common cause of death in the developed world after cardiovascular disease. One in two men and one in three women born after 1985 will suffer cancer in their lifetime, from which one in six will die.

To understand this failure of contemporary treatment approaches and arrive at a better understanding of cancer we will look into its molecular biology, analyze the history of cancer research, question the philosophical views and economic and political motives behind modern approaches to the disease, and investigate why diagnosis and treatment are overemphasized over prevention. All this will be placed against the background of current economic, political, and environmental developments that are tightly involved in the genesis of cancer as a public health problem. From there, we will inquire whether a different paradigm that comes from thermodynamics, systems biology, ecology and sustainable design could provide a more appropriate view of cancer, and discuss what it might take to implement such a paradigm to reduce the suffering of cancer patients around the world.