Interesting read is "The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
There have been several miracle "cures" for cancer, none of them has turned out to be a miracle cure. Even the idea that cancer is not "one cause, one cure" has not been held for a long time, and was never universally held. Lymphoma was always treated differently than breast cancer, for instance.
But the more interesting point in the book, re a cure for cancer: "the only intervention ever known to reduce the aggregate mortality for a disease--any disease--at a population level was prevention. Even if other measures were chosen to evaluate our progress against cancer...it was indubitably true that prevention, as a strategy, had been neglected by the NCI in its ever-manic pursuit of cures."
In other words: cures make good headlines; we get excited by cures. But the only way to reduce the mortality rate of cancer is through prevention. Long-term we'll make more progress finding ways to prevent cancer, not cure it.
There have been several miracle "cures" for cancer, none of them has turned out to be a miracle cure. Even the idea that cancer is not "one cause, one cure" has not been held for a long time, and was never universally held. Lymphoma was always treated differently than breast cancer, for instance.
But the more interesting point in the book, re a cure for cancer: "the only intervention ever known to reduce the aggregate mortality for a disease--any disease--at a population level was prevention. Even if other measures were chosen to evaluate our progress against cancer...it was indubitably true that prevention, as a strategy, had been neglected by the NCI in its ever-manic pursuit of cures."
In other words: cures make good headlines; we get excited by cures. But the only way to reduce the mortality rate of cancer is through prevention. Long-term we'll make more progress finding ways to prevent cancer, not cure it.