Showing results by narrator "Martyn Swain" in All Categories

In 1961 John F. Kennedy pledged to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Nine years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Ten years later, Richard Nixon echoed this pledge by declaring a "war" on cancer. More than thirty years later, however, cancer remains one of the largest causes of death worldwide, with around one in three developing the disease. Curing cancer is not "rocket science," but the question is, why has cancer proved to be harder to tackle than the moon landings turned out to be?

Pangloss would have been right at home in a post-truth, social media world. You can imagine the tweets, “I was hanged and survived #soggyrope,” or, “#nosyphilisnochocolate.” Candide, written in 1759, was never more relevant than today. Blind obeisance and denial, barbarous villainy, greed, and rapacity, are all in a day’s toil for the young Candide. And this is in the best of all possible worlds!