why do people donate money to cure cancer?

They aren’t slacking. It’s that curing cancer is tough and very very difficult. Do you think that they’d do a better job at creating cures if they didn’t have any money at all?

I’m sorry about your aunt.

People donate money to cure cancer because there isn’t a cure yet they’re afraid that they or someone they know will get cancer. It’s precisely because chemotherapy and radiation treatment are not always effective that people donate money.

I assure you that there is research being done, and the researchers aren’t slacking off. Science takes time. It may seem like nothing is happening because to the general public, all that is noteworth is a cure, but really, understanding what makes cancer cells different from normal cells, and finding ways to attack only cancer cells is so unbelievably complex that there is new information coming out all the time about it, it’s just that it’s not really exciting to the general public.

One of the problems in searching for a cure for cancer is that each case is different. Cancer occurs when mutations in the genetic code of a cell cause it to grow when it’s not supposed to, and eventually to spread to places that that type of cell is not supposed to be. Depending on what type of cell it started as (and there are a _lot_ of kinds of cells in your body), exactly what mutations occured, and the unique genetic code of the unique individual. Although cancer cells tend to "undifferentiate," and become in many respects similar to stem cells, cancer cells from different types of tissues still have different characteristics. There are no univeral markers of cancer cells that can guide a treatment to the type of cell they are supposed to target, and avoid killing normal, healthy cells. Unless there is a major breakthrough that allows scientists to design methods to target all types of cancer cells and no other cells, it’s not a matter of coming up with a single cure for cancer, but rather hundreds, if not thousands, of different cures for hundreds, or even thousands, of different cancers.

In about a week and a half I’ll be leaving for a summer research internship at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, and, while the lab I’ll be working in isn’t directly involved areas of research that are going to cure cancer (although the research they are doing certainly has implications for more direct cancer research), I’ll probably be able to tell you a bit more about the cancer research scene at that point if you’d like. But even before then, I can assure you that in every research lab I’ve been in you’ve got a lot of people working extremely hard for many hours a day for not a whole lot of money. I would not call it slacking off.

While it may seem like cancer research isn’t making any progress, I did a quick search on Google Scholar for journal articles on cancer published in 2006, and it turned up over 27,000 articles form the past five months alone. While most of this stuff isn’t going to look like much to the general public (i.e. people who don’t have much background in biology), it’s all stuff that was important enough to be published in a peer-reviewed journal article, which may or may not mean anything to you, but I assure you it’s evidence of progress.