Biden’s Plan to ‘End Cancer’ Borrows From an Old, Flawed Playbook

Last month, an agency that President Joe Biden pledges will help “end cancer as we know it” came one step closer to fruition. Congress approved, and the president signed into law, a bill allocating a $1 billion budget for Biden’s new research enterprise: the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, which aims to develop novel approaches to treat and prevent not just cancer, but also diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes. It’s an agency with curious historical inspiration, modelled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a semi-independent agency developed in 1958 and steeped in the Cold War culture of secretive high-tech military projects. Biden explained that, like DARPA — which brought us “everything from the internet to GPS and so much more” — ARPA-H is designed to support the incubation and development of “ideas so bold” that no other funder would possibly take a risk on them.

Far from being revolutionary, though, ARPA-H is structurally remarkably reminiscent of an endeavor started more than 50 years ago when then-President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in his 1971 State of the Union address. Like Nixon’s war, Biden’s present-day mission to conquer cancer seems destined to fail.