NHS: Cancer Treatments

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a magical debate. I cannot remember anything quite like it in all my time in your Lordships’ House and I believe it will have a profound effect. I express my great admiration for my noble friend Lady Jowell: for her steely determination, her compassion and her humanity for other people. This debate will be seen in many different countries.

Quite a few years ago, the celebrated American biologist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with mesothelioma, which is cancer derived from contact with asbestos. Doctors told him that he had only eight months to live—or that is what he thought they had told him, because this was the average survival period. He looked at this, as a statistician, and understood that what matters about an average is not just the average itself but the span of possibilities. He famously said:

“I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole”.


He studied the evidence on survival rates, in a careful and sophisticated way, and his conclusion was that,

“those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle … and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer”.

Stephen Jay Gould lived for 22 years after his diagnosis. Admittedly, this was through the supreme force of his will and his knowledgeability, but it shows that you must interrogate any diagnosis that is made. That is crucial; it was crucial for him. Moreover, his fame brought mesothelioma out of the shadows where it had languished for so long—a bit like with tobacco, there was a lot of industry resistance.

My glory was stolen a bit by the previous speaker, because I was going to conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of some of the greatest innovations ever made in medicine. These are coming very quickly. Why? Because of the algorithmic power of supercomputers; because doctors and medical researchers can share their research instantaneously across the world, which was not possible before the digital age; and because of linked advances in genomics and genetics. There is enormous hope. For example, the situation with myeloid leukaemia, which was thought to be incurable, is now quite different because of these research breakthroughs.

The main question to be asked of the Minister is the one that inspired the debate: will these breakthroughs be confined to the privileged few? The NHS is in the middle of a horrible crisis. The problems of the changing demographic structure of our society lie behind this. Will the Minister say, forcefully, that the treatment of relatively rare cancers such as brain cancer and mesothelioma will not suffer as a result of the situation in our health service, and that he will take direct measures to ensure this?