Is Curing Cancer Really Within Reach?

I have been thinking about this for 3-4 months now. Cancer really is a horrendous disease, especially since it’s fatal many a times.

This blog post was trigged by today’s news by Michael Bloomberg’s fight with cancer. In his post, he mentions that we are closer to curing cancer than ever and he wants to speed up the process. To the effect, that he’s put money where his mouth is:

we are thrilled that Johns Hopkins University will create the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, thanks to private grants of $125 million. This new institute will build on the school’s groundbreaking work in immunotherapy, one of the most promising avenues of research today. 

We could very well be closer to curing cancer, but really do we need to “cure” cancer?

As we all know cancer is a disease of genes and throughout our lives our cells, which holds our information keep adding new info. Sometimes, there’s an error and those cells become cancerous. 

But how does this error occur?

But we can stack the odds of avoiding cancer in our favour. Things that happen throughout our lives can speed up – or slow down – the rate at which errors occur in our genes. These include things we can control, and some we can’t.

They include our lifestyle, our genetics & family history, our exposure to viruses, the job we do, the air we breathe – and they can all play different roles in our overall risk of developing the disease.

The world that we live in is constantly changing and so does our genes need to adapt to the change. 

Have we explored the possibility that instead of curing cancer we need to figure out whether the error really is an error or is it our body adapting to the ever changing world?

Have we explored the possibility that instead of curing cancer we need to figure out if this process of adaption can be speed up?

I don’t have any answers nor do I have any medical knowledge to question these stuff. This is just what I’ve been thinking.

Or maybe I am watching too many superhuman movies.