Our cells are spaghetti code, the worst technical debt created by the random chances of evolution. There are multiple competing systems (e.g. telomeres) at cross purposes. Think trying to patch up bad software: you can perhaps make some small improvements to reliability, but overall there are so many thousands of errors due to design flaws that you cannot fix the system overall.
To fix cancer would require some extreme design challenges. We can fix a few of the bugs e.g. we reduce mutations by using sunblock. Perhaps we could copy some systems from other animals - hard but perhaps not impossible.
After we fix cancer, we need to fix cell aging, which the most obvious effects start kicking in about 60ish. Oh, and we also need to fix brains: they fail in complex ways. Human lifetime problems are fractal trees, not linear steps.
All of us have some amount of cancerous cells at any given point in time, we just don't notice most of the time because our body is quite adept at detecting and neutralizing cancerous cells before they become a problem.
What we call "cancer" are the cancer cells that managed to slip past the body's defences, so "curing cancer" doesn't necessitate addressing all cell copy errors. We just need to figure out how to deal with the small handful our body can't address.
I agree we all have many benign cancers. But chronic cancer is not really cured cancer.
You seem to be suggesting we could find a way to detect harmful cancers and ignore benign cancers, but I am fairly sure that any “detection” couldn’t be discriminating enough (~100% true positive) to say it was a cure for cancer. Also cancer is often noticed once it has already caused damage, perhaps harmful damage, so your cancer is “cured” but the patient would sometimes get loss of function.
Our cells are spaghetti code, the worst technical debt created by the random chances of evolution. There are multiple competing systems (e.g. telomeres) at cross purposes. Think trying to patch up bad software: you can perhaps make some small improvements to reliability, but overall there are so many thousands of errors due to design flaws that you cannot fix the system overall.
To fix cancer would require some extreme design challenges. We can fix a few of the bugs e.g. we reduce mutations by using sunblock. Perhaps we could copy some systems from other animals - hard but perhaps not impossible.
After we fix cancer, we need to fix cell aging, which the most obvious effects start kicking in about 60ish. Oh, and we also need to fix brains: they fail in complex ways. Human lifetime problems are fractal trees, not linear steps.