Rendering Inuit cancer “visible”: Geography, pathology, and nosology in Arctic cancer research

Abstract

ArgumentIn August of 1977, Australian pathologist David W. Buntine delivered a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australia in Melbourne, Victoria. In this presentation, he used the diagnostic category of “Eskimoma,” to describe a unique set of salivary gland tumors he had observed over the past five years within Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Center. Only found amongst Inuit patients, these tumors were said to have unique histological, clinical, and epidemiological features and were unlike any other disease category that had ever been encountered before. To understand where this nosological category came from, and its long-term impact, this paper traces the historical trajectory of the “Eskimoma.” In addition to discussing the methods and infrastructures that were essential to making the idea of Inuit cancer “visible,” to the pathologist, the epidemiologist, and to society at large, this paper discusses how Inuit tissue samples obtained, stored, and analyzed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, came to be codified into a new, racially based disease category – one that has guided Canadian and international understandings of circumpolar cancer trends and shaped northern healthcare service delivery for the past sixty years.

Revisiting and proposing the most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology

“…By 2018, 101 most important questions have been peer-reviewed and published [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. These key questions have triggered significant interest in the research fields of cancer etiology [16][17][18][19], epidemiology [20,21], metabolism [22,23], apoptosis [24], senescence [25], angiogenesis [26,27], cachexia [28,29], immunology [30][31][32], treatment resistance [30,33], and novel therapeutic modality [34][35][36][37]. In Figure 1, we present the distribution of the questions categorized into broad topics, some predominantly clinical and others more biological.…”