Late in September 1970, many in the US cancer establishment were promising that a vaccine for cancer was imminent. They thought they had found virus particles in a whole variety of cancers. They thought that cancer would succumb to human endeavour just as Polio had a decade or so before.
In the end, cancer turned out to be a more intractable problem. Yet there was one cancer were a virus was pretty clearly the cause. That was cervival cancer.
In the 36 years since the virus cancer fad of the early 1970s, much has been done. And finally last week, the US FDA announced that it had licensed a vaccine for cervical cancer. What a result?
