  This whole matter is complicated by the fact that the study of cancer is itself big business. Indeed, some compare cancer research and medicine to a “medical industrial complex.” Cancer pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and cancer research more generally, are major drivers of the economy. On the one hand, given the loss of life due to cancer, one could argue that the time and energy devoted to cancer care and research is proportional to the threat. Löwy (1996) in her Between Bench and Bedside characterizes this as the “white” (optimistic) reading of the situation. Arguably, however, many other diseases, often those more prevalent in “developing” parts of the world, cause far more extensive loss of life. As Reiss and Kitcher (2009) and Reiss (2009) have argued, from a “Millian” perspective, we ought to be expending our resources on those diseases that proportionally cause the greatest loss of life, and so, at least from a strictly maximizing utilitarian perspective, these diseases have a greater claim on our investments.  The vast funds invested in cancer research—at least during the past 25 years or so—have done very little to shift mortality rates. This leads to what Löwy might call the pessimistic answer to this question. According to one line of thinking, the centrality of cancer in biomedical research is a product of several historical, economic, institutional, and social forces in combination, some of which are self-perpetuating (Proctor 1995; Fujimura 1996; Clarke &amp; Fujimura 2014). Ever since Nixon’s 1971 call for a “war” on cancer, advertised implications for cancer treatment or prevention have been used to bolster much of basic research into genetics, genomics, and cell and molecular biology, fostering investment in biotechnology. Some have argued that this has led to an unduly excessive, or disproportionate fear of cancer as a disease, an excess of anxiety, and perhaps also unnecessary or unwarranted use of medical screening and testing (Aronowitz 2007, 2009, 2015).