The trouble with talking to doctors about cancer is that they are in the business of the possible; the bounds of their world are, rightly, what can you do bette

The trouble with talking to doctors about cancer is that they are in the business of the possible; the bounds of their world are, rightly, what can you do better with what you have today. But for cancer what you have today is a set of pretty terrible tools, and there really isn't much that can be done to make them very much less terrible other than research and development of new tools, the very thing that isn't in the remit of most doctors. This is one of those situations where you have to look forward. I think I'm willing to wager that first things worthy of the name cure for cancer will involve temporary suspension of all methods of lengthening telomeres. Not great for you, but worse for a cancer, and you can wait out its withering away. The technology exists now to suppress telomerase and the known ALT gene products via RNAi or similar, with the only challenge being to solve the problem of reliable tissue coverage every time. All cancers depend on telomere lengthening, no exceptions. The real path to the defeat of cancer is to find commonalities, to escape this business of one therapy, one team, one large budget, one ten year hit-and-miss development process for every single one of hundreds of narrow subtypes of cancer. The commonalities don't get more common than telomere lengthening.