[vectorpush]

Totally agree. I'll also add that we don't even need to definitively eradicate the possibility of cancer to consider it effectively "cured". If we can reduce the rate of cancers such that they only start to appear in populations that are approaching, say, 80+ years of age, it will probably become more effective to focus on other leading causes of death rather than dwelling on cancers that end up killing people in their 100s (if general life expectancy rises to the point where cancer becomes endemic among the bustling 100+ age demographic, we can cross that bridge when we come to it)

[yaakov34]

Yeah, we'll definitely want a "dementia moonshot", or a few, before we attempt to create a generation of centenarians. However, cancer incidence climbs terrifyingly rapidly when people reach their 60s - long before we are ready to give up on them. A successful cancer moonshot (and the Nixon one, by the way, was quite successful) will let millions of people enjoy many good years with their loved ones; not to mention that it would also save many young people from dying of cancer, although that's a much smaller share of cancer patients.

[XorNot]

My otherwise healthy grandfather is going to be killed by cancer in the next few months. And for what seems like an utterly stupid reason: if they cut it all out of his neck, there's no way currently to replace the lymph nodes he'd lose or create enough replacement tissue to cover it over.

Actually coming to grips with the idea that a seemingly mundane engineering issue is what gets him was surprising.

Give that problem 10 years and I suspect I'll read the news one day and hear about how we've now solved it.