For much of its history, the cancer war has been fighting the wrong battles, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies. The campaign has targeted the disease and left off the table the things that cause it—tobacco, alcohol, workplace hazards. Conceived in explicitly military terms, the effort has focused on defeating an enemy by detecting, treating, and curing disease. How the world in which we live and work affects whether we get cancer has been either overlooked or suppressed. The result is appalling: over 10 million preventable cancer deaths over the past thirty years.

This has been no accident.

The official cancer effort was directed by leaders of industries that generated a host of cancer-causing materials and products. Their economic interest lay in making the disease less deadly but never in preventing it altogether. The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows, decade by decade, how this leadership acted to downplay research on prevention, and kept research on environmental causes from gaining widespread circulation or benefiting the general public—and how this suppression of knowledge continues today.

Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, this is the story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain.