Many of us know what it is like to receive a diagnosis of cancer. Those of us who don’t are probably close to someone who has. 

Half of men and a third of women in rich countries can expect to suffer from the disease at some point in their lives. Across the world cancer is responsible for roughly one in six deaths. In more than half of cases the risk factors behind their affliction are unknown. 

That sounds like a litany of failure. And compared with the hopes of finding a cure within five to ten years, which Richard Nixon encouraged with his War on Cancer in 1971, it is.

However, our cover this week looks at the steady—if gradual—progress that is turning cancer into a disease that many people can survive or, better, avoid altogether. 

What scientists hoped would be a blitzkrieg has turned out to be a war of attrition. Cancer is related to age, and if you strip out the effects of increasing life spans, the age-adjusted death rate has fallen year after year since the early 1990s. We describe the victories behind those falling numbers and set out the exciting new science that promises victories to come.