> The only cancer research that goes on is the kind designed > to stop cancer. That's ludicrous. If solutions were obvious then we would only need engineering.

> The only cancer research that goes on is the kind designed > to stop cancer. That's ludicrous. If solutions were obvious then we would only need engineering. The problem is most of the time "you can't get there from here" - there are still huge swaths of poorly understood territory in fundamental cancer biology. For example how are the natural cell death mechanisms circumvented; how do some cancers hijack the transcription mechanism to promote certain cell growth; how do cancers promote growth of new blood vessels to support their expansion. Of course the goal of the research is to stop cancer, and some of these paths will help, but only some research is directly drug- or treatment-related because there are still too many things we don't know to be able to design effective, targeted treatment