Hello Henri Tapani Heinonen,

Is this a serious question?

We can't even wipe out most non-human parasites in the human body. The level of medical technology required to wipe out human cancer cells without killing off non-cancerous human cells is very daunting. But we improve each decade.

Lawrence

Added: How long do you guess it will take to develop a cure for toe nail fungus infections? It should be very easy to differentiate between fungus cells and human cells, so we should reach that medical level decades before we have a general cure for cancer.

Not too long, because CPUs are getting faster and faster. Computer simulations are the key to solve all the problems. Right?

I agree. Computing (and applied physics and chemistry) will play a very important role in biotechnology advances. But we are very unlikely to leap to a cure in the near future. We have to master an enormously complicated field of knowledge. Biology is not simple. I seem to recall that a human cell will normally contain at least a quarter million ribosomes churning out proteins for various cellular structures. So we are trying to develop a map covering a city with a quarter million factories in it. We don't know how much detail we need to put on the map, but real understanding of our biology is going to be difficult.

We can hope to stumble over a magic bullet (a cure for cancer) before we complete the map, but we cannot expect to have such luck. On the other hand, if we do not start mapping the city, we can expect to have no luck at all.

Hoping for good luck, but not predicting it -
Lawrence

There is indirectly for one type of cancer.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2007/10/26114714

If you had read my post (and understood it), you would have noticed that I said "indirectly".