Much excellent work has been published in recent years on the history of cancer: research, the treatment of cancer, and the history of individual malignant diseases. In these histories, as in the historiography of medicine more broadly, progress narratives easily outnumber histories of failure and disappointment. Historians of science, technology and medicine by and large, tend to display a somewhat paradoxical attitude to progress. While a declared aim has often been to contextualise practitioners’ claims about scientific and technological progress, we have nevertheless tended to focus on stories that epitomize such progress: innovative surgical procedures, artificial organs, the place of the laboratory in medicine, new medical technologies or other science-driven innovations such as medical genetics.

My paper aims to contribute to the history of failure and frustration in science, technology and medicine. My case study is lung cancer research, mostly in Britain, and much of it funded by the UK Medical Research Council. When historians have written about lung cancer, then mostly in the context of the successful epidemiological work leading to the identification of tobacco smoke as the main cause of this disease, which has acquired iconic status. I will look at clinical research: the mostly futile quest for a cure. Chances of survival for patients diagnosed with lung cancer have improved very little over the last three decades; surgery as the mainstay of therapy hardly changed between 1950 and 2000. Attempts to apply approaches such as chemotherapy, successful for other cancers, yielded frustrating results. My paper addresses how clinical researchers, patients, and others involved in—unfortunately more often than not—futile efforts to revolutionise the treatment of a recalcitrant disease, have dealt with this dilemma. Responses, as I will show, ranged from resignation to soldiering on.