First, I very much appreciate your comments, especially give how close to home this issue is for you.

Sadly, you are correct – cancer and its treatment is a business! Yet there are plenty of people in this business who do what they do because they want to make the world a better place. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that we still desperately need better ways of translating promising research into effective treatments – ones that primarily benefit patients rather than shareholders. And part of this must be focusing on prevention and early detection. The profits may be less, but the benefits will be substantially greater!

It still seems that, while we have an awful long way to go to develop a complete understanding of cancer and its treatment, there are exciting new technologies in the wings that will help detect and address certain cancers. Lets hope that we also learn to do better in how we enable these to develop into effective, available and affordable treatments.

As a daughter who’s mother is going through stage 4 colon cancer, which was misdiagnosed for over 6 months, I find it irreprensible that we as a world, as a country, as a people, are not putting more money into research on technologies that hold more promise, such as nanotechnology, and instead continue to dump endless monies into old band-aid fixes, which we know will not work in the end.  

If we have a technology, which helps with diagnoses, why are we not integrating it into practice yet?  Everything you read on cancer mentions early detection is the key to survival. 

Instead “Chemo will kill you if the cancer doesn’t” — has become an all too common mantra that we’ve grown to accept . . . Why is that?    
     
Baker seemed to be the only one who brought up this issue of cost.  We need not look far to see how close our government, insurance companies, and pharmaceuticals are– and where the money gets spent.  

Unfortunately, it does come down to money– case in point, why would we be pushing back colonoscopies from once every 5 years to once every 10?  The sad truth– cancer has become a business.  

If only there were some true political pioneers who were willing to make a change and make LIFE a business instead, but then how would they get elected?  Who would help finance their campaigns?            

I came across an article on the web from 2004 ( http://nano.cancer.gov/objects/pdfs/Cancer_brochure_091609-508.pdf).  As a non-scientist, reading this article it seems the technology has been there, but we don’t appear much further along… And I have to ask why?  

Ironically, it mentions 2015 as a discovery date, which seems to pay credence to Filipponi’s argument of settting clear expectations.  Although, shouldn’t there be some sort of expectations or goals?  Withouth them we are hopeless.  People are dying, not just a few, and as previously mentioned that is the reality

I did not agree with Whitesides when I first read his quote, but it should be obvious to anyone on reflection that destroying cancer cells or stopping the spread of cancer is only one part of the battle. We can do that right now with a wide variety of methods. A single explosive device can kill all the cancer cells in several individuals in a heartbeat.

The trick of course is to kill the cancer without killing the patient.

Cancer treatment today uses plenty of generally destructive methods – surgical removal of affected and surrounding tissues, radiation, and chemo, etc. I’m not a doctor but I can see the treatments slowly killing my brother’s wife as they try to kill the cancer or even just slow it down.

My hope is that researchers will soon find ways to better identify and target the diseased cells, and destroy them without destroying the healthy ones. I don’t care if it is a nanobot or nanodrug or laser or that little cylinder shaped thing Doctor McCoy used in Star Trek. I want my sister in law to live and be free of cancer.