The human body is a non-orthogonal system. Everything in it is interconnected and exists in interrelated dynamic tension. We're still finding new structures in living humans that went undetected in cadaver analysis [1].
If you've written any code at all, you know that a non-orthogonal system is incredibly complex. It isn't just a matter of complexity scaling linearly with the count of the individual parts. Complexity scales with the interactions between each component, and between the assemblages of those components that have emergent interactions. Change one line of code, and you get wildly different behavior in another part of the system, or seemingly nothing for a long time until the system deletes its own database suddenly one day.
Curing cancer is a dramatically broad statement, because each kind is different, interacts with a different part of the body, and has different ways of growing and sustaining itself. Each intervention causes a cluster of unintended side-effects, again, because the body is a non-orthogonal system. Even your simple statements fall flat. Most cancer cells disguise themselves as normal cells from the perspective of the body's immune system. It's why the cancer can grow at all. The other factor is that most things that would kill cancer cells would kill cells... in general. Pull one thread wrong, fix one bug the wrong way... you end up doing more harm than good.
Maybe we'll get to a point where we have combinations of nanotech and gene therapies that eliminate most cancers. But it won't be simple. Getting there in an ethical fashion makes it even harder. How do we experiment with this kind of nanotech (which is not even off the ground yet). How do we experiment with this kind of gene therapy (we have more traditional paths to tread here, but there are still some quandaries).
We're just not there yet, and I doubt it will ever be something as reductive as your two items.
> The other factor is that most things that would kill cancer cells would kill cells... in general. Pull one thread wrong, fix one bug the wrong way... you end up doing more harm than good.
Yep. It's like modifying an undocumented API where there are tens of thousands of endpoints and you know there are a few dozen services that rely on each endpoint, and probably a few dozen more that nobody knows about. You are only allowed test runs that are expected to succeed, since test failures = death. Your dev environment is a mouse. Every change gets pushed to prod with no option to revert.
If you've written any code at all, you know that a non-orthogonal system is incredibly complex. It isn't just a matter of complexity scaling linearly with the count of the individual parts. Complexity scales with the interactions between each component, and between the assemblages of those components that have emergent interactions. Change one line of code, and you get wildly different behavior in another part of the system, or seemingly nothing for a long time until the system deletes its own database suddenly one day.
Curing cancer is a dramatically broad statement, because each kind is different, interacts with a different part of the body, and has different ways of growing and sustaining itself. Each intervention causes a cluster of unintended side-effects, again, because the body is a non-orthogonal system. Even your simple statements fall flat. Most cancer cells disguise themselves as normal cells from the perspective of the body's immune system. It's why the cancer can grow at all. The other factor is that most things that would kill cancer cells would kill cells... in general. Pull one thread wrong, fix one bug the wrong way... you end up doing more harm than good.
Maybe we'll get to a point where we have combinations of nanotech and gene therapies that eliminate most cancers. But it won't be simple. Getting there in an ethical fashion makes it even harder. How do we experiment with this kind of nanotech (which is not even off the ground yet). How do we experiment with this kind of gene therapy (we have more traditional paths to tread here, but there are still some quandaries).
We're just not there yet, and I doubt it will ever be something as reductive as your two items.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-say-they-... (2018)