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And by the way! Even a trillion trillion ain't going to cure cancer. The reason "they" (Big Pharma? Guys in universities?) haven't found a cure is because there are so many missing links and so many different types of cancer. In fact of course huge progress has been made in survival rates for many cancers but by no means all.
When Fleming discovered penicillin it wasn't on the back of trillions of dollars of state funding. He had a lucky accident and then (here comes the genius), he knew what to do with that accident. Anti-biotics followed and the rest, as they say, is history. (Another accidental discovery close to our own hearts, boys, would be Viagra of course. Good old Pfizer pharma!)
I guess knowledge is heirarchical: you find a step and build the next one on to it. The mobile phones we use now couldn't have been invented 30 years ago because all the other stuff like micro chips and digital technology and so on wasn't there to build on. You could have given Leonardo da Vinci a trillion of state funding and (despite what some people say), he wouldn't have invented the helicopter or the motor car coz he needed someone else to come up with the first step in the heirarchy: the internal combustion engine. And that needed steel and oil which he also didn't have.
It isn't just a question of taxpayers' money being poured into research. We all see what governments do when they get hold of large wedges of OUR money and it's not a pretty site!
Rest assured, there is a guy in a lab somewhere in Big Pharma in the US or Switzerland, most likely,plugging away at something quite different, who will discover a cure or successful treatment for prostate cancer. Perhaps even more useful would be if he discovers a way of telling if the cancer they can now find so easily is even one that needs treatment. When he does I hope he and his company makes millions. They will deserve every penny.
