From the Cancer Epidemic to the Climate Crisis My journey from medical research to climate activism

It is now common knowledge that exposure to certain chemicals (such as those found in cigarette smoke) can cause cancer, but that was not the case at the start of the 20th century. At that time, scientists were not even sure that carcinogenic chemicals actually existed. All they knew was that workers in the paraffin, shale oil and coal tar industries had a high incidence of skin cancer; the identity of the particular chemical within these tars that causes cancer remained a mystery. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s that scientists at the Cancer Hospital Research Institute in London (which later became the Institute of Cancer Research) made this discovery. After years of research, Ernest Kennaway and his team found that the cancer-causing agents are a group of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The first PAH to be categorically identified, in 1932, was a compound called benzo(a)pyrene. This was a monumental scientific breakthrough: benzo(a)pyrene was the first pure compound to be shown to have cancer-causing properties, and the first carcinogen to be found in cigarette smoke. (We now know there are many others).

When I joined the Institute of Cancer Research about 20 years ago as a young researcher, I felt honoured to be following in the footsteps of Kennaway and his colleagues. I was eager to contribute to the ongoing effort to understand and to prevent cancer. Yet, despite my enthusiasm for my work at the Institute, just a few years later I left the field of cancer research behind me. Instead, I chose to pursue political ecology and activism for climate and environmental justice.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you about all this. After all, what does cancer research have to do with the climate crisis? In fact, as I argue in this piece, there are many lessons from the field of cancer research (and biomedical sciences more widely) that can help us in addressing the climate emergency. These arise in part from the parallels between the mainstream approaches to tackling these two issues – cancer and climate change.

In this piece I delve into these parallels, drawing on my own personal journey from cancer research to environmental activism. The personal is political, as the slogan goes, and I believe that my own experience, though far from being typical, can provide some insights that might be helpful in the struggle to prevent climate breakdown.

When I embarked on my PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research, I had high hopes about pursuing a career in scientific research. I wanted to contribute to increasing our understanding of cancer in order to help eradicate it. The focus of my research at that time was what’s called ‘environmental carcinogenesis’ – studying how environmental factors contribute to the formation of cancerous cells and tumours. More specifically, I was looking at the cellular impacts that result from exposure to the carcinogenic compounds (the PAHs mentioned earlier) that are generated from processes like burning tobacco and the combustion of fossil fuels.

The more experiments my team and I conducted, and the more research by the global scientific community I read, the more I became convinced that cancer is largely an environmental disease. An astonishing 90% of cancer cases are estimated to be driven by external factors – lifestyle, surroundings, and pollutants – rather than solely by heredity or genetics. Major culprits are tobacco (which causes nearly 90% of lung cancers), poor nutrition, alcohol, sun exposure, some infections and certain chemicals. 

Perhaps most important of all is the pollution in our environment. Environmental pollution is an international public health problem, with multiple negative effects on health – including causing cancer. Many environmental pollutants have been proven to be carcinogenic: asbestos, benzene, exhaust gases from gasoline engines, food and water contaminants (such as arsenic), persistent organic pollutants (such as pesticides and dioxins), and smoke from burning fossil fuels and biomass for domestic heating.

These external influences – from tobacco and alcohol to pesticides and smoke – trigger genetic mutations in our bodies that can lead to cancer. Cancer can therefore be understood as an environmental disease.

The positive side of this is that it means that a large part of the cancer epidemic may be preventable. We just need to reduce people’s exposure to these carcinogenic influences. The bad news is that this is not yet happening – or is not happening at an adequate level.

One would have expected (perhaps naively) that since cancer is largely an environmental disease, most research (and funding) would prioritise investigating the cancer-causing environmental factors, in order to eliminate them. This would dramatically reduce the number of cancer cases and associated deaths. In lay terms: better health outcomes for everyone. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Why?

The answer is that biomedical research is to a large extent oriented towards treating the symptoms of diseases like cancer, rather than preventing them by addressing their root causes. Of course, it goes without saying that we do need to treat cancers (and other diseases) when they occur. However, compared to prevention, this usually comes at a very high cost – not just in monetary terms but also in terms of the impacts on patients of chemically toxic treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. ‘Vaut mieux prévenir que guérir’ as the French say. Or, as the English expression has it: ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’!

But if this is so, why does biomedical research focus on treating symptoms, rather than tackling the root causes of diseases? The answer is capitalism. The dominant focus on treating symptoms is not simply the result of adopting a ‘realistic’ or ‘pragmatic’ approach in a situation in which establishing the causal links between environmental factors and a disease is highly challenging and time-consuming. Rather, it is a result of capitalist logics and the relations of production, including the prime place given to the profit motive.

I will give you a very telling example that illustrates this point. In 2010, the Institute of Cancer Research underwent restructuring, which meant getting rid of departments that were not deemed sufficiently ‘sexy’ or ‘fashionable’ – in other words, those that were not attracting big funding or were not in line with the spirit of the time. This included the whole Chemical/Environmental Carcinogenesis Department (where I was conducting my doctoral research), which was axed in its entirety. This was a shocking and ironic move, considering the Institute’s groundbreaking work in the early 20th century, referred to earlier. The Institute’s impressive legacy didn’t matter to those in charge, because the department (and the approach it applied) was considered to be ‘misaligned’ with the priorities of a new era: one that prioritises pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine in pursuit of profit, and whose overriding motto is ‘more drugs, baby, more drugs!’

This experience was an eye-opener for me: I realised that science is neither neutral nor immune from the capitalist ideology of compulsive accumulation and profiting from crises. Success in this scheme of things is measured by the number of drugs that go to the market, whatever their real merit – and whatever their impact on people’s health.  

Big Pharma churns out more and more drugs (read commodities), not to eradicate diseases but to reap massive profits. Its raison d’être is to monetise health issues and to profit from disease.1 Examples that illustrate this point abound: Big Pharma was never interested in developing a vaccine for malaria because it wasn’t lucrative enough (since malaria mostly affects poor brown and black populations in the Global South); it imposes stringent intellectual property rights that obstruct access to life-saving therapies (such as for AIDS in South Africa); it engages in fraud and illicit marketing, and it throws safety measures and warnings out the window – as in its role in America's opioid carnage, which has claimed more than 400,000 lives.

It was this preference for ‘cures’ (in the form of more and more drugs), rather than prevention (in the form of tackling root causes like environmental pollution) that led the Institute of Cancer Research to close the department where I was working. This event – which was decisive for my own career – was just one part of the entrenchment over the last few decades (if not longer) of a capitalist rationale in the way we think about tackling disease and ailments: commodifying health and focusing on short-term money-making fixes. Who needs prevention when you can make a fortune from personalised medicine?

While the pharmaceutical industry frequently pats itself on the back for its achievements in saving lives, at a fundamental level what it cares about most is its bottom line. For pharmaceutical companies, the most lucrative option is treating a disease’s symptoms or tackling it after it occurs – rather than preventing it in the first place. This approach mistakes the tree (the symptoms) for the forest (the disease itself). Or, as an eloquent North African proverb on futile efforts has it: it ‘hides the sun with a sieve’.

This business-first approach is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or to the issue of combatting diseases. In many other sectors, huge vested interests likewise work tirelessly to ensure the status quo remains untouched: the food industry shapes our largely unhealthy diets, agribusiness champions a chemical-intensive agricultural model, and the car industry favours widespread individual use of polluting vehicles. What these different industries all have in common is the huge amount of money they spend lobbying politicians and decision-makers and engaging in public relations to manipulate the narrative around what needs to be done in the face of the crises they are causing, from obesity to air pollution. Their aim is to steer us away from radical solutions that might threaten their status and their profits.

But these industries don’t stop at public relations activities. They often actively work to undermine scientific research that threatens their interests. An example is how the tobacco industry did everything it could to deny the causal link between tobacco smoking and cancer, including funding right-wing scientists to produce biased research favourable to their theses.

This brings us back to the climate crisis. Like Big Pharma and the other sectors mentioned above, the fossil fuel industry is a capitalist sector that strives to maintain the status quo – even as it knowingly causes harm to people and planet. As merchants of doubt (just like the tobacco industry’s efforts to hide the link between smoking and cancer), for decades fossil fuel companies have denied the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change, and have shown a hellbent resolve to destroy the cause of environmentalism. Likewise, just like Big Pharma’s approach to cancer, the fossil fuel industry proposes short-term fixes, cosmetic measures, and false solutions that merely treat the symptoms (at most) of climate change, avoiding the radical transformation necessary to prevent further harm.

Most of all, these efforts – from the tobacco industry to Big Pharma to the fossil fuel industry – seek to avoid the important conversation that must take place if we care about ensuring a dignified life for all: a conversation about the root causes of the huge challenges we face. Such a conversation necessarily leads us to the political economy of capitalism, and its ills. It is this political economy framing – with its focus on the dynamics of capital and empire – that I apply in my work around political ecology and the ecological crisis.

In 2013, only a few years after the closure of the Chemical/Environmental Carcinogenesis Department at the Institute of Cancer Research, I was no longer engaged in cancer research: I was documenting the anti-fracking uprising in my native Algeria for a London-based organisation called Platform. My work sought to shine a light on the growing relationship between Algeria and the UK in the oil and gas sector (as well as the two countries’ military cooperation). In doing so, I conceived the struggle of Algerians against fracking as a socio-environmental conflict and a struggle by the dispossessed against fossil capital, as well as a fight against global and local attempts to grab more resources while creating ‘sacrifice zones’- areas given over to resource extraction at the expense of the local population.

This work led me to a clearer view of the links between the fossil fuel industry and the climate crisis, and it led me to learn more about climate justice struggles elsewhere across the world. In 2015, my colleagues at Platform and I (working with others) launched a collective book titled The Coming Revolution in North Africa: The Struggle for Climate Justice, which linked the climate justice agenda in the region to the revolutionary demands of the Arab uprisings of the early 2010s: for bread, social justice, dignity, freedom and popular sovereignty.

After carrying out field work in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, I became convinced that we cannot talk about environmental and climate justice without linking them to questions of socio-economic justice and national/popular sovereignty over land and resources. I came to see socio-environmental conflicts as symptoms of a neocolonial extractivist model of (mal)development and its dispossessing mechanisms. I also realised that these dynamics are not limited only to conventional extractive sectors (fossil fuels, mining, agrobusiness): they also affect the renewable energy sector. My colleagues and I documented this in another collective book titled Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (2023).

What I realised through these diverse experiences was that the same mechanisms that I had encountered in my work as a cancer researcher – of powerful industries causing a problem and then addressing (or pretending to address) its symptoms, rather than tackling its source to prevent it – were also dominant in the climate crisis.

I saw the most glaring proof of this in the hijacking of the United Nations Conferences of the Parties (COPs) by corporate power and private interests – including the fossil fuel industry. I watched as the number of fossil fuels lobbyists attending the COPs increased dramatically over time – to the point that at COP30 in Belém (2025) they outnumbered all other delegations (except Brazil’s). If that was not bad enough, the presidents of COP28 (in Dubai, in 2023) and COP29 (in Baku, in 2024) were both oil executives. It was like asking the arsonists to put out the fire they had started! Unsurprisingly, instead of forcing richer nations, big polluters and multinationals to reduce carbon emissions and not engage in any new projects of fossil fuels extraction, these global summits increasingly promote profit-making techno-fixes like geo-engineering and carbon capture technologies, alongside market-based false solutions like carbon trading and so-called ‘net-zero’ and ‘nature-based solutions’.

As the presence of oil executives at the COP summits shows, the same greedy and authoritarian power structures that have contributed to climate change are now shaping the responses to it. Their main goal (just like Big Pharma’s approach to diseases like cancer) is to protect private interests and to make even greater profits. While the international financial institutions (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and Global North governments and their agencies are all now articulating the need for a climate transition, their vision is of a capitalist – and often corporate-led – transition, not one led by and for working people. These diverse actors don’t shy away from highlighting the dangers of a warmer world, and they even argue for urgent action (including using more renewable energy and developing adaptation plans). But their analysis remains limited – and even dangerous – as it threatens to reproduce the patterns of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the prevailing fossil fuel regime. The vision of the future that is pushed by these powerful actors is one where economies continue to be subjugated to private profit, including through further privatisation of water, land, resources, energy – and even the atmosphere.

Just like most cancers, which are driven by avoidable external factors rather than genetics, the climate crisis was not an inevitable fact: it has been, and continues to be, driven by the choice to keep burning fossil fuels, and by a deluded belief in perpetual economic growth. This is a choice that has been made predominantly by corporations and governments in the Global North, together with national ruling classes in the Global South. This includes those in the Arab region (from which I come), where energy and climate plans are shaped by authoritarian regimes, parasitic local elites and their backers in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Brussels and Washington DC. Despite all of their promises, the actions of all of these players show that they are enemies of climate justice and of humanity’s very survival.

In my career so far, I have moved from efforts to tackle one massive predicament (the cancer epidemic) to the struggle against an even bigger one (the climate crisis). Through my work on both I have come to understand that the same tactics and strategies are used by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Rather than radically changing our lifestyles and the way we produce and consume things, we are told by Big Pharma not to worry as it can offer us miraculous drugs and chemical treatments that can solve all our problems down the line. Likewise for the climate crisis: rather than confronting (fossil) capital and making it accountable, we are compelled (if not forced) to accept its false solutions to the crisis it has created. What I have learned from both sides of my career is that behind our failure to seriously tackle both cancer and the climate crisis lies the same pattern of commodification, corporate power and the pursuit of profit.

I have also learned what I believe is needed to overcome both of these predicaments: a radical break with business as usual. Instead of treating ourselves with more and more drugs, we must radically transform our unhealthy and stress-inducing lifestyles and tackle the pollution in our environments. Instead of working with the fossil fuel industry, we must confront it. Human health and the sustainability of Planet Earth cannot be left to the private sector. In a nutshell, overturning the disastrous status quo means confronting capital – resisting its logics of appropriation and extraction, reclaiming our lives from the deadly claws of the market, and placing human and non-human needs at the centre of an eco-socialist vision that can truly heal our bodies and save our planet.