John Christian Bailar III, an epidemiologist and biostatistician known for his criticism of NCI’s emphasis on treatment, died Sept. 6, 2016. He was 83.
Bailar riffed on the bellicose language of President Richard Nixon’s “War on Cancer” to suggest that the war in question was being lost. Researchers have focused too much on treatment and not enough on prevention, he argued.
“Years of intense effort focused largely on improving treatment must be judged as a qualified failure,” said Bailar in a 1986 article.
This is an excerpt of an article that was published in full in The Cancer Letter.
Vol. 42 No. 34 | September 16, 2016
