It's one thing. It's a mutation in the DNA that causes uncontrolled cell division. You unlock the key to that, you unlock everything. Anything else from these fucking science bros is just language games of classification.
EDIT: Apart from the thoughtful replies from TerminalEncounter and HiImThomasPynchon, the snark in the rest of the comments is through the roof. From the same people, btw, that will shout "ACAB right now," "guillotine capitalists right now!," "FALC right now," "gulag them all right now!" As though those are more realistic than what I'm envisioning. No wonder online/western leftists never get anything accomplished. Ironically, you're the behaving exactly like kind of people that would have made snarky comments in the past like "lol aboslish slavery, yeah I wish we could do that!" or "give women the right to vote, yeah if only it were that easy!" It's a weird kind of regressive reactionary thinking (except of course for things they personally want to get done, then it's "we can do it right now"). It's weird, with homelessness, the solution is "simply give them housing" but with this it's "it's more complicated honey..." Fucking pathetic...
It's not just one mutation in the DNA, it's a bunch of different possible ones. You can't just "solve" mutation - nature has had a headstart of billions of years on us and still hadn't sorted it unfortunately. Even if you could make it so that cells NEVER EVER mutate in one of their oncogenes because of some miracle intervention, you still can get point mutations from retroviruses (like the flu) or from random cosmic radiation or just, yknow, THE SUN. There really is no complete perfect prevention.
And then most of the time your T cells are just fine with killing cancerous cells. And most of the time, cancer cells can't figure out how to recruit blood (angiogenesis or whatever it's called). And most of the time, it can't figure out how to metastasize. But for lots of cancers, we DO have great interventions to the point that watchful waiting is the best thing to do lol (because surgery or chemo would be worse). We "cure" cancer all the time. And there are new interventions like checkpoint inhibitors that wreck the shit out of cancer to the point where I've had patients who 10 years ago would've had 6 months to a year but now they're 2+ years on and still going. And there's places like Cuba that have fucking VACCINATIONS against lung cancer.
The best thing we could do to solve cancer would be to have an economy based on social need. So, no more polluting where people breathe and drink. Adequate housing with adequate ventilation so they dont get covid (which can weaken immunity) or the flu (which can trigger oncogenesis very rarely) or TB. Good healthy food that's available. Work that isn't stressful (chronic atress is a risk factor for cancer). And it has to last long enough that the epigenes that get passed on are also inactivated. If we did all that plus keep up systemic therapies for all and/or surgery and RT as indicated and kept developing new interventions - we'd be in a way better place.
Was gonna comment about a weird trend of oversimplifying medicine I've been noticing on here lately before realizing it's the same OP on all the posts I was thinking of 💀
Yeah whats up with that? This is like the third anti-medicine post from them
What an interesting user. Anti-medicine and pro-car infrastructure?
It's a nice pet and we should keep it, it's obvioualy one of us doing bits
Also, a lot of time in medical science when they research new biologicals they have to reference 50 year old soviet work because they were so far ahead of us. The west went with chemistry (probably because of profit incentives), they went with biologicals. We would be so much better now if we could've worked together considering all the new shit is just biologicals and immunotherapies.
Here, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Stopping mutation through evolution is pretty much impossible even if you could somehow engineer an artificial way to keep all cells from changing because evolution is mutation.
Some are dead ends or dangerous issues sure but plenty provide small benefits that have a .001% more likelyhood to survive that over a large population and long period of time so dropping mutuations entirely would be silly anyway. Adaptation is important.
I mean I could have said all this too but I am cursed with brevity.
I need to work on my concision lol, I swear I have a few like Manchuria candidate style activation phrases that make me type out novels worth of content or speak on them extemporaneously