Why Haven’t Biologists Cured Cancer?
8th July 2024
“We were promised the curing of cancer and all we got are so-and-so improvements in five-year cancer survival rates” would be a fair thing to say about progress in biomedical sciences in the last few decades. And cancer is one of the disease areas where we have done pretty well, relatively speaking. If we look at Alzheimer’s, the situation is much worse: up until 2021, we had gone for 20 years with no new drugs – and even the approved ones have marginal effects.
The big question is: Why? A common explanation is that biology might simply be too hard for us to manipulate successfully. Humans have come up with very clever solutions to defeat all these ailments, but despite our ingenuity, we simply cannot match what has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. Another explanation is that this is, to use a very online term, simply a “skill issue.” It’s not that biology itself is too hard, we’re just not being smart enough about understanding and manipulating it.