"This idea of "curing cancer" as if cancer was a monolithic disease really needs to die." I respectfully disagree. Maybe our problem is that of attitude, which

"This idea of "curing cancer" as if cancer was a monolithic disease really needs to die." I respectfully disagree. Maybe our problem is that of attitude, which you also exhibit when saying "with a single, or even handful of drugs". Drugs as such may be a dead end. Once upon a time, we decided to study cancer from a biochemical and genetic point of view and look for drugs, which may actually be suboptimal. To give an analogy, what if you tried to debug a faulty program using a beeper instead of a debugger with screen. It would be a nasty work and it would take long. This is not an intrinsic problem of software ("fundamental undebuggability of 10 thousand errors"), it is "just" a wrong approach to debugging. We are not the only mammals, we can look around nature and learn from it. What do we see when we study cancer in other species? Mammalian species that are highly resistant to cancer (whales, bats, naked mole rats etc.) seem not to rely on drugs or their biochemical equivalents, but rather kill cancerous cells biologically, with help of their immune systems. Notably, if a species is highly resistant to cancer, it tends to be highly resistant to all sorts of cancer at once, or, at the very least, to many sorts of cancer at once, which indicates that a common suppressive mechanism for cancer ("cure" or "preventive cure") is well within the realm of possibility and that for all their biochemical diversity, cancer cells can be universally recognized and whacked in an efficient way. The same actually holds about young people. Our own species is highly resistant to almost all cancers at once when young, and incidence of most cancers tends to grow with age along a very similar curve, which, again, indicates some commonalities under that extreme biochemical diversity. Most of the progress in fight against cancer in the 21st century comes from biological approaches, not from better chemicals. The chemical approach may be fundamentally flawed. Yeah, a "cure" in form of a chemical drug is likely impossible. But a "cure" in a form of a genetic treatment etc. may well be possible. Anyone down for adding some whale genome to theirs? :)