[reasonattlm]

There is a general cure for cancer.

Look up interdiction of telomere lengthening. Different groups are looking into how to sabotage telomerase and ALT mechanisms. If both can be achieved, then any cancer can be shut down. Those are the only ways to lengthen telomeres, and cancers cannot live without them.

Finding an ALT drug candidate is as simple as running assays on the drug libraries; the assay hasn't existed for long, which is why this hasn't been done yet in any major way. The SENS Research Foundation raised $70k last year to run a preliminary scan of a few thousand compounds. That's about what it costs these days.

So not quite garage science yet, but getting close.

[jcranmer]

You're vastly underestimating the difficulty in curing cancer. It is very easy to kill cancer cells. The problem is that we want to target cancer cells and only cancer cells. There have been several attempts to kill cancer cells by withholding key ingredients in necessary metabolic pathways, only to find that the cancer cells do a better job of scavenging those than the non-cancer cells.