By Paul Monk, in The Australian
The Morrison government announced plans to channel 80 million into Melbourne’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre to make its cutting-edge treatment available to those afflicted with various cancers. Bill Shorten then upped the ante by declaring Labor would subsidise cancer treatment with an extra 2.3 billion. Suddenly, cancer has become a live issue in the election campaign.
Writing as someone who has been the beneficiary of pioneering cancer treatment at “Peter Mac” for 14 years, I’m interested in this political story. But the bigger story is the history of how the cutting-edge treatments now available became possible. How many people even noticed that, on October 1 last year, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for breakthrough discoveries in stimulating the human immune system to attack cancer cells?
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