You are right. But you could take the cancer pill and then get a heart attack, or dementia, or become suicidally depressed etc. Will we make a pill for all thos

You are right. But you could take the cancer pill and then get a heart attack, or dementia, or become suicidally depressed etc. Will we make a pill for all those things as well? I'm not at all saying we should give up on cancer research (I'm doing a PhD in the field at the moment). My point in the last paragraph is this: prevention is applied to healthy people, but taking pills to prevent a disease is quite an odd notion of 'being healthy'. We should think carefully if the pills4prevention paradigm is going to deliver us the sort of outcomes and lifestyle we really want. I worry that the whole idea encourages an almost absurdly narrow and reductionist view of human health.