This reminds me of Paul Graham's recent list:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3686840

Except there is no mention of cancer. Is a solution really so much out of reach?

I feel like there's an identity issue here to blame, something along the lines of "we're programmers, we're not about making medical breakthroughs".

Yet I can't shake off the notion that everything, absolutely everything, is interlinked, and we're in a better position, perhaps the only position, to understand and exploit this concept fully, in order to solve such problems.