| Nothing cures cancer in the sense that people mean when they speak of "curing cancer" as some sort of saintly alternative to "living your life." Many thousands of people are treated for cancer every day. Some of them survive significantly longer, or are significantly happier, as a result. None of the many, many people who work tirelessly to treat the sick are ever credited with "curing cancer," though that is what they do, every day, one person and one day at a time. I worked as a cancer researcher for three years. It was kind of embarrassing. People tend to fawn over you. You get a lot of credit you don't deserve. I never cured any cancer that I know of. I gave cancer to a lot of mice. Few of them ever recovered. Downstairs in the shop were some machinists. They didn't have Ph.D.s. They made custom radiation shields for patients undergoing radiotherapy. When a beam of cell-destroying radiation blasts the tumor inside, say, your head, you want to be sure it blasts as little of the rest of your head as possible. Your future depends, in part, on the quality work of the machinist who carefully builds your radiation shield, just for you, according to the plans drawn up by your friendly medical physicist. These people cured cancer. For all I know they've been laid off by now, replaced by a terrifying molten-lead-extruding 3D printer or something. But they should be proud. People are alive today because of their work. People survived long enough to see graduations and weddings because of their work. People suffered less because of their work. If we ever really do "cure cancer" in the grand-visionary sense of having a magical vaccine against all cancer, people will rapidly become bored of it. Every fifty years or so there will be a resurgence of cancer because folks will have forgotten what it was like, but the rest of the time nobody will care. There will be a small but crucial guild of people who guard the knowledge and procedures for keeping cancer at bay for all humanity, and nobody will know their names except at industry conferences. But that's okay. This is how life really works. It's really big and you live your part of it. Only in the movies does a bright light shine down out of the sky when you do good things. |