Keeping our eye on the ball: the American Society of Preventive Oncology in 2009.

A common adage among those who play games that involve balls-baseball, for example-is that one must keep one's eye on the ball. The baseball player attempting to catch a grounder or fly ball must watch the ball-where it has been, where it is-into his or her glove; the player who diverts his or her gaze to where he or she will throw the ball after catching it chances not doing so. One must attend to the first thing first: catch-or hit-the ball. Absent that, nothing matters. For us in the American Society of Preventive Oncology (ASPO), the first thing is cancer prevention. We must not avert our gaze from prevention, must attend to it, strategically position it within the battle against cancer. We must not lapse into complacency or comfort with the instruments on methods we employ. Our experiments must be as pure, our statistics as elegant, our biology as sophisticated as possible. But our eye must be not wander: not to satisfaction or comfort with the experimental purity, the statistical elegance, nor to the sophistication of the biology we have borrowed. No: it must train on the question: “How can we go about better preventing cancer?” Our goal is to lessen cancer as a threat to the lives of our fellow citizens in America and throughout the world. We want first to prevent it, to keep it from occurring. Given that it has occurred, we want to help identify the best possible methods of addressing it; our participation in the search for better therapy may help us to identify better means of prevention. Increasingly, we argue that, cancer's having occurred, we want to help those afflicted to live as positive-fulfilling and unlimited-lives as possible; we want to prevent the deleterious effects of the disease and its therapy. Increasingly, we seek to understand the costs of therapy in light of the increment to life expectancy resulting from that therapy. In this, my final exercise of the ASPO presidential prerogative, I will begin with a very brief recapitulation of the cancer prevention history that spans the emergence and life to date of ASPO. I will touch on 3 key facets of where prevention has been and juxtapose it to where it is now. I will close with some suggestions as to what ASPO needs to do in the future.