will we ever cure cancer? can we live longer then 1000?

[Pariee]

I am in year 7 and this is for a school project

[DrP]

We already can cure/eradicate some cancers with radio therapy, some chemical treatments and even surgery to remove effected parts. Type 'Cancer treatments' into google to see what comes up.

[Anatanoshi]

Even if we could cure cancer easily i doubt we'll be able to live more than 1000 years...

There will always be another illness that will pose a problem to us.

[Bender]

About 50% of cancer patients are cured at the moment, so we are making great progress.

 

Apart from curing cancer, we'll have to cure ageing, i.e. give our bodies the ability to keep replacing tissue with new, young tissue.

 

That and Alzheimer: not much point in keeping the body young when the brain is gone.

[CharonY]

Technically you cannot cure cancer per se, as the underlying mechanisms are part of our normal cell physiology. Even if one defines it as absence of cancerous cells, at best one can call it remission, as there are currently no means to exhaustively screen for the every single cell. In fact, there is a good chance that at any given time there are a handful of mutated cells doing aberrant things, but as long as they do not proliferate they do no (obvious) harm.

 

In addition, the 50% number sounds more like another hallmark of treatment, which is the 5 year (or 10-year) survival rate. And obviously there are huge differences in these rates ranging from way above 90% for testicular cancer to about 1% for pancreatic cancer. Another measure is the 5-year remission rate, meaning that no signs of cancer have been detected in this period, though most stats refer to the survival rate, instead (as it is easier to aggregate data on that measure).