To clarify, that quote is not something the journalist wrote. It's the opinion of Jarle Brivik [1]. It is also a statement that was made in the context of a few

To clarify, that quote is not something the journalist wrote. It's the opinion of Jarle Brivik [1]. It is also a statement that was made in the context of a few current moonshots aimed at solving cancer, and is referring specifically to concrete issues Brivik has with the paradigms underpinning those concrete attempts. In particular, the quote is not meant as some sort of claim about the metaphysics of cancer or anything ridiculous like that. Rather, it's a (perhaps not so eloquently stated) way of pointing out that the mathematical and biological models underlying the current (and again, concrete) moonshot attempts fail to account for certain important issues and that this strongly suggests that those models are not going to result in cures. The rest of the article summarizes some of Brivik's warrants, which are well thought-out. The claim is that the models currently used are fundamentally incapable of explaining how certain environmental factors effect cancer and the rest of the body, and that these environmental factors are important for understanding how to "solve" cancer because cancer evolves over time in often unexpected ways. The article points out, for example, that there are modeling assumptions baked into Microsoft's approach that are empirically falsifiable. Finally, I'll just re-iterate that the argument made in the article is made in the context of current proposed/ongoing moonshots, so various comments about nanobots at the like are totally off-topic. The article is not about science fiction. The topic is not whether maybe one day in the far future we might have enough knowledge about cancer cells to take a purely mechanistic approach toward curing cancer. Whether, the article is about the allocation problem in real science, today, and makes an argument against the efficacy of the approach taken by some current, concrete, well-funded moonshots. [1] https://www.med.uio.no/imb/english/people/aca/jbreivik/ https://www.med.uio.no/imb/english/people/aca/jbreivik/