From Jon Barron’s Lessons from the Miracle Doctors book.

“Most current research is a waste of time and money. It is magic bullet nonsense. Take the search for the cancer gene. Are there genes that give one a predisposition for getting cancer? Absolutely. This is exactly what the Baseline of Health talks about when it refers to your Personal Health Line at the time of birth.

But looking for a cancer cure by finding the cancer gene will do nothing to eliminate all of the other factors responsible for cancer. And we already know how small a role the cancer gene plays in the onset of cancer: there has been an 8-fold to 17-fold increase in the incidence of cancer in the last hundred years, but not even one-millionth of 1 percent of that increase can be related to genes.

Genes evolve over hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years, which means that the so-called cancer gene has had no impact on the huge increase we’ve seen since 1900. Virtually 90 percent of the cancer that we see today cannot possibly have anything to do with genes. So, at best, genes are responsible for only a small percentage of the minimal cancer rates we had in the early 1900s, and finding the cancer gene will affect only that tiny percentage of cancer. Genes may create tendencies, but in most cases they are not the underlying cause. Bottom line: look not for a cure in the cancer gene.

There is, however, a ray of hope in the world of medical research. In the last few years, medical research has started committing resources to the development of methods to harness and enhance the body’s natural tendency to defend itself against malignant tumors. Immunotherapy represents a new and powerful weapon in the arsenal of anticancer treatments. Sometimes referred to as biological response modifiers or as biological therapies, these new treatments–such as interferons and other cytokines, monoclonal antibodies, and vaccine therapies–have generated renewed interest and research activity in immunology.”

From Jon Barron of jonbarron.org