For Katie Couric, the fight against cancer is a deeply personal cause: In 1998, the CBS Evening News anchor lost her husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer, and in 2001 her sister Emily died of pancreatic cancer. Long a devoted activist, Couric cofounded the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance (NCCRA) and famously underwent a colonoscopy on the Today show. Recently, she helped develop the idea for Stand Up to Cancer, a star-studded fund-raising special airing Sept. 5 on NBC, CBS and…

Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It Not long ago, I asked a respected cancer researcher if he could send me raw data from a trial he had recently published. He refused. Sharing data would make the study team members “uncomfortable,” he said, as I might use this to “cast doubt” on their results.I’d heard this before: as a statistician who designs and analyzes cancer studies, I regularly ask other researchers to provide additional information or raw data.

The Changing Face Of Breast Cancer Six months ago, Liu Lichun didn’t know her breast could contain cancer. No one had taught the 40-year-old Chinese woman from Inner Mongolia what the disease was. She’d never heard of a mammogram or mastectomy. It had thus never occurred to her that she would lose her left breast to the mysterious illness nor that such a loss would probably save her life. The lump that transformed Liu’s world was not much larger than a marble.

TO a public now accustomed to calls for “a cure for cancer,” it can come as an unpleasant surprise to learn about the complexities of cancer. “Cancer” is not one disease, but a category encompassing many different diseases, and we are more likely to see incremental advances against individual types of cancers than universal cures. But there is also promise in this more nuanced view. The great variety of cancers reflects the fundamental

BREAST CANCER FACTS + Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among American women, behind skin cancer. It is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women, behind lung cancer.+ This year, more than 200,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer, which a woman has a 1-in-8 chance of developing during her lifetime.+ An American woman’s chance of dying of breast cancer is about 1-in-33. About 40,000 American women will die of the disease this year