If it seems as if this year has featured one report after another about Donald Trump and his team effectively giving up on combating cancer, it's not your imagination. The president has proposed slashing funding for the National Cancer Institute. His conspiratorial and anti-science health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scrapped funding for mRNA research, despite clinical trials showing mRNA-based vaccines increasing survival in patients with deadly cancers. I've lost count of how many cancer-related research grants at universities have been cut off without explanation. It's against this backdrop that The New York Times reported that a half-century after Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, there have been a great many breakthroughs that have saved and extended lives. The incumbent Republican president, however, is effectively waving the white flag in this war.