The submitted article is quite interesting. It is a review of the new book The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--and How We Can Get There by Vincent T. DeVita,[1] and includes many surprising details from the book's account of the history of cancer treatment research. We see a lot of gee-whiz submissions to Hacker News of press releases about untested "cures" for various diseases, many of which have not proven effective over the years that I have been reading Hacker News. If you are curious about how new medical research findings turn into standard medical practice--or don't--you will enjoy reading the article submitted here. I think I will read the book, as I grew up with a parent who was involved in cutting-edge medical research.
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.
This seems to be one of those broad "change the research culture and its rules" essays rather than anything about a specific technology or scientific insight that could truly cure cancer.
It was the HTML doc title, always a legit candidate for original title on HN. In this case, baity though, so we've changed it to one of the alternates.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Death-Cancer-Pioneering-Winnable/d...