FRONT PAGE: "In Long Drive to Cure Cancer, Advances Have Been Elusive," by Gina Kolata, New York Times, 24 April 2009.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: "Treating cancer: Illuminating surgery; A clever way of highlighting tumours to make them easier to remove," The Economist, 25 April 2009.

Great chart on jump page shows how death rates from heart disease goes down dramatically over the past half-century and that accidents have been reduced somewhat. Meanwhile, Alzheimers slowly builds from small numbers to about half of what accidents are.

But cancer is a flat line: we improve so much and yet the death numbers remain.

To me, that's just the reality of an aging population because cancer is fundamentally a fellow traveler as we age.

I can tell you from what I learned with daughter Emily: there are plenty of cures out there for childhood cancer, but you can abuse a child with chemo and radiation and surgery in ways that you simply cannot with elders. They just lack the resilience and their cell-division rates have slowed down so much in comparison.

So breakthroughs, like the one described in the Economist where cancer cells are illuminated from within for easier spotting and removal during surgery, but I don't expect cancer to decline that much, even with our coming biology revolution.

People will still die, no matter the delay, and cancer will remain a biggie, yes?