i've never understood why there hasn't been a Kennedy "let's go to the moon" kind of thing to cure cancer. Big Pharma conspiracies the only reason I can think of.
While I don't deny that Big Pharma is greedy as hell, there are genuine efforts to try and find "cures" for cancer.
Part of the hardship of it is that there is so many different variants of cancer even within just one particular type of cancer. You can get cancer on almost every part of your body. Now imagine there are at least 10 different variants on each of those. Plus some people may get multiple types of cancer at once; now it's more complicated because you can't know for sure if what works for one particular strain will work for the other. Or maybe they'll make it worse. The idea of a singular miracle drug, while not
technically impossible, is a
very long ways off. But if they can establish the groundwork for individual pills that can cure individual strains, they can build from there.
Another aspect is money. By which I mean, all cancer money isn't being directed to one singular cancer cure research institute. It's spread out over many, many places. And all of those places are essentially in competition with each other so research isn't always being shared openly across the board. (And not all of that money is
actually going to research, either.) When your motivation is primarily to be the "first" so that you can get a patent and charge any $ amount (and trust me, they absolutely do; look at how much they want to gouge for even
insulin), you're not going to feel very motivated to potentially help another company. This isn't on scientists/researchers on the ground level, obviously, but this is where Big Pharma capitalism comes in.
(There's also room in the discussion for the waters being muddied by fabricated results/research, like what happened with some of the leading
Alzheimer's research. That can lead scientists/researchers down rabbit holes and dead ends that will waste valuable time. Unfortunately the penalties for fabricating such findings are not yet steep enough to deter people from
not doing it.)
"Let's go to the moon" is much easier in a practical sense in the same way that "let's build a nuclear weapon" was easier. It's a singular endpoint goal with all of the money and resources being directed to one place. And no real focus on any capitalistic gains.