On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst imaginable news: he had cancer – the one that subsequent tests would reveal as multiple myelomaCancer of blood and severe bone marrow.
Jon was said He could have as little as 18 months to live. He was 38 years old, a flourishing editor in New York with a 7 -month -old girl whose third birthday suddenly achieved, he could never see.
“As I was told that I had cancer, I just said” no, no, no “,” said Jon in an interview last week. “It cannot be true.”
The fact that Jon is still there, who spoke to me in 2025, tells you that things did not go as medical data would have predicted this morning in November. He lives with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for over 20 years, an experience he tells with grace and mind in his new book An exercise of uncertainty. This 7 -month -old girl is now at university.
You could say that Jon beat the chances, and he is well aware that chance has played a role in his survival. (“Did you know that” Glück “is German for” luck “?”, He writes in the book, noting his good fortune that a random spill about the ice is what sent him to the doctor first, allowing them to take his cancer early.) Cancer is always a terrible threat to health, which is responsible for 1 death out of 6 worldwide, killing nearly 10 million people a year worldwide 600,000 people a year in the United States.
But Jon’s story and his survival demonstrate something that is too often missed: we have turned in the war against cancer.
The mortality rate adjusted at age in the United States for cancer decreased by about a third since 1991This means that people of a given age have about a third risk of dying of cancer that people of the same age more than three decades ago. Added to Over 4 million Less death against cancer during this period. Thank you to the breakthroughs in treatments like Harvest of autologous rod cells and CAR-T therapy – The breakthroughs from which Jon benefited, often just in time – Cancer is not the death branch that he was in the past.
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There is no doubt that, just like the rise in smoking in the 20th century led to a major increase in cancer deaths, the just as strong drop in tobacco consumption has finally resulted in a delayed decrease. Smoke is One of the most powerful carcinogens in the world and at the top of the early 1960s, around 12 cigarettes were Sold by adult per day in the United States. Remove cigarettes and – after a few decades – lung cancer deaths drop in turn with others Deaths related to non -cancer smoking.
But like Saloni Dattani wrote In a large room earlier this year, even before the decline in smoking, the mortality rates of non -poumished cancers of the stomach and colon had started to fall. Just like in particular, mortality rates for childhood cancers – which, for obvious reasons, are not linked to smoking and tend to be caused by genetic mutations – have also dropped significantly, Declining six times since 1950. In the 1960s, for example, only about 10% of children Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today is more than 90%. And the Five -year survival rate for all cancers increased from 49% in the mid -1970s to 69% in 2019.
We have made strikes against the most difficult cancers, such as the Multiple myelome of Jon. Around the moment Jon was diagnosed, the The five -year survival rate was only 34%. Today, it is up to 62%, and more and more people like Jon live for decades. “There was a revolution in cancer survival,” said Jon. “Some diseases now have much more successful therapies than others, but gains are real.”
The spectacular turn in the death curve due to cancer did not take place by accident – this is the interest composed of three revolutions.
Although anti-tabac policy has been the greatest rescue, other interventions have helped to reduce the risk of people’s cancer. One of the greatest successes is the HPV vaccine. A Study last year found that mortality rates of cervical cancer – which can be caused by HPV infections – in the United States, women aged 20 to 39 had dropped from 62% from 2012 to 2021, largely thanks to the propagation of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there are strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing the incidence of cancer.
The next revolution is better and previous screening. It is generally true that the previous cancer is captured, the better the chances of survivalAs Jon’s own story shows. According to a study, the impact of colorectal cancer at an advanced stage among Americans over 50 years denied By a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because the levels of colonoscopies have almost tripled during this same period. And new screening methods, often employing AI or using blood testscould simplify preliminary screening, less invasive and therefore more easily available. If the twentieth century screening aimed to find physical evidence of something bad – the bump in the breast – the 21st century screening aims to find cancer even before the symptoms occur.
The most exciting of all are the border developments in the treatment of cancer, a large part of which can be followed thanks to Jon’s own experience. From drugs such as lenalidomide and Bortezomib in the 2000s, which Helped double survival of median myelomaAt Propagation of monoclonal antibodiesThe real pierced in treatments have significantly prolonged people’s lives – not only per month, but over years.
The most promising development may be CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than trying to kill cancer directly, immunotherapy transforms a patient’s own T cell into guided missiles. In a Recent study by 97 patients with multiple myelomaMany of which faced palliative care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy did not have cancer detectable five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see.
“Car-T is breathtaking-very futuristic of science fiction,” said Jon. He underwent his own treatment lesson in mid-2023 and wrote that experience, which put his cancer in a remission in which he is still, left him “physically and metaphysically new”.
Although there are even more battles to win in the war against cancer, and there are certain areas – like the Increased rate of gastrointestinal cancers among young people – Where history does not improve, the future of cancer treatment improves. For patients with cancer like Jon, this can mean a new challenge – supporting the essential uncertainty which has just lived under a controllable disease but which could always return.
But it certainly beats the alternative.
“I came to trust my doctors so completely and in these new developments,” he said. “I try to remain carefully optimistic that my future will be very similar in the past 20 years.” And it is more than he or anyone could have hoped for almost 22 years ago.
A version of this story originally appeared in The Good Newsletter. Register here!
