I'm really getting sick of my favorite people dying of cancer. I hope he had some fun.
For some incredibly interesting reading on the history of battle against cancer I highly recommend The Empreror of All Maladies [0].
0: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography/dp/...
But yeah, there seems to be tons of money in the problem. Take into account how many rich people don't want to die and have cancer. And, while there are many different kinds of cancer, they all just boil down to unregulated cell growth. Could that be solved programmatically? I think so, provided we could interpret existing genetic code and write it from scratch. But we are far from this--at the moment, we can't even read it in long strands very well.
The other stronger assumption is that the processes that underpin how cells work are mechanistic in the way that we understand mechanistic processes, that is to say that there is no hidden step that invokes "a new physics". Again I say I do not know if this is true, but no one knows that it is true.
We are silly apes at the beginning of an intellectual adventure that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, or more. Or it may not, we may snuff ourselves out, or we may find that things are as simple as our current theories seem to intuit. However I would point to the following; until recently (20 years) cosmologists were utterly unaware of 80% of the universe as it is now perceived, there are five models of probability in common use in statistics even though there are probably (geddit) an infinite number of models, no one knows what life is, no one can adequately define intelligence, no one can adequately define consciousness; no one can describe the processes that define a cell; no one can make a list like this that is not risible (seriously). The point is, we know shit, and it's really not surprising given how big the universe is and how long we've been in the game of trying (with any degree of seriousness) to understand it.
RIP. Never read many of his stuff but what I read was very good. I do hope he hadn't suffered much at the end.
The reason cancer is so hard to fight is that it's not so much a single type of bad cell but an evolutionary process (see: clonal evolution) that continues to generate hardier bad cells. Cancer is when cells become individually fit (in an aggressive way) at the expense of the organism. Cancer isn't one undesirable mutation; a typical cancer cell has at least 5 detectable mutations. It's a process.
The perversity is that cancer treatments are themselves carcinogenic (of different cancers) because the stress on the body (exposure to cellular toxics) causes faster mutation and creates more opportunities for mutant cells (that thrive amid the toxin, at least differentially) to take over.
This is also why cancer can stop responding to treatment. It's like antibiotic resistance.
People are working on more targeted treatments (including minimally invasive ones like radiofrequency ablation) than the typical systemic chemotherapy. The problem is that these are best used with early detection. At Stage IV, the cancer is likely to be all over the body and systemic treatments are necessary... but there are limits to how far those work.
But you say that some of the easier cancers have already been cured (near 100% survival rate, which is as good as it gets since it would always be possible to discover too late), or mostly so: do you know why this haven't been more widely published or talked about? I mean we haven't cured all infectiones diseases (or even the common cold), but when the cure was found for polio it was massively published, to the extends that court rooms took a break to hear the announcements.
Some cases of advanced colon cancer can be cured if the disease has only spread to the liver, by cutting out the disease in the liver.
But your most common cancers eg breast, lung, colon for the most part, gastric,prostate... they aren't curable once widespread.
A lot of people, and Mr Banks...not so much.
Harnessing the immune system however - now that could be more promising as an approach that the cancer can't evolve away from as easily eg announced just last week: http://www.ascopost.com/ViewNews.aspx?nid=4189
http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/n...
High risk, ambitious ideas are more than worth a try.
The underlying theme isn't just "cell growth". It's about cells that override the body's mechanisms for coupling individual fitness with the body's needs. Much of what makes the disease hard to treat is that cancer cells become increasingly fit (individually speaking) over time, and while systemically damaging the environment (e.g. chemotherapy, radiation) works great if it kills all of them, if it doesn't, it leaves an even more fit subset alive.
Which doesn't mean it doesn't suck.