Which is to say, that there is no single magic bullet that will end all cancer. This is because of what cancer is — a nature often obscured by the language of treatments and punchy catchphrases and political platforms of “advancing a cure” — but the nature of cancer is that of an animal outside of your body. That of a brain eating amoeba that doesn’t necessarily need to eat your brain but, hey, it’s there and it’s tasty, so it does.
The key to understanding cancer is understanding the body as an ecosystem, not the body as an individual. If the cell is the smallest unit of life, you are a world unto yourself made up of multiple trillions of cells working towards the continued operation of you — the planet they both build from their bodies and depend on for survival.
The nature of being a multicellular animal means that you’re depending on all parts of your system to fill their niches as intended. Your skin cells need to keratinize, die, and rise to the surface to protect you. Your immune system needs to reliably recognize the cells that are doing their job and the ones that aren’t, and then walk the line between killing you and killing the invader in the subsequent immune response. Your pancreas cells need to produce insulin so you can break down the sugars you eat for better absorption by the cells lining your small intestine. Each of these cells has a job to do, and has largely lost the ability to live on their own or form their own colony.
Cancer occurs when these individual pieces, these smallest parts of you, do not need you anymore. Instead of prioritizing the whole complex organism, they throw an evolutionary switch that prompts them to favor their own mutated DNA. Their own cells and daughter cells, sucking away vital nutrients from the other organs doing as they’re supposed to. The process of individual darwinian evolution kicks back on in a cancer cell, and tells it to propagate against the cells around it. Reverts it back to the disorganized bacterial mats covering the primordial shore in the earliest days of life: divide, your host be damned.
To make matters more complicated, this evolutionary switch back to selfish single-cellularity can be mediated by dozens of factors. In the case of skin cancer, it’s UV radiation, toxins in your environment penetrating down to the living cells just beneath that top layer. A sunburn can kick that switch. In liver cancer, it might be mediated by PFAs — forever chemicals in your drinking water, in our blood — that lodge in the toxin-neutralizing cells and tell them to stop doing their job. In cervical cancer, it can be mediated by a variety of HPV (human papilloma virus) that infects cells and prompts them to divide out of control, causing warts, causing cancer in whatever tissue it comes in contact with.
Sometimes, its simply a consequence of aging cells. An aging system. You become a dying world as you age, the ends of your chromosomes shortening, your cells more prone to error as they divide on less and less of a buffer. Perhaps divide less. In a mad-dash to the finish line, a misguided cell or two might take off in an evolutionary charge to the finish and finish you in the process.
Every cancer is an organism within itself. In the same way that you are not exactly like your mother, your cancer will not be exactly the same as your mother’s cancer. It is a different animal, a part of your ecosystem that will only ever arise in you and never be seen again in that same arrangement of cells and genes and spread throughout the world of your body. There is no cure for cancer, because there is no single cause. There is no magic bullet.
from the pen of icarus blake 
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