Yesterday Britain's last working mammogram machine, previously at the forefront of the fight against breast cancer, was delivered to the Medical Museum. The uncomfortable and unreliable form of cancer screening it once performed is now achieved with a simple and effective blood test. This mammogram machine will be going into our cancer section, along with the radiotherapy chamber and various samples of old chemotherapy drugs. The other significant development that has led to the emptying of the cancer wards is today's quick detection methods, which means that the genetic changes needed for all cancers to develop can be turned on or off as soon as they appear.
Surgery is rarer now because mutations are less likely to end up as a tumour.
A blood test can detect which genes are being expressed in a dangerous way and, even when tumours do develop, genetic analysis can tell us a lot more about which drugs are likely to be most effective against which tumour. By analysing the genes of a cancer, we can pinpoint distinctive markers on the tumorous cells, then develop a vaccine to attack them.