I had a very strange idea.
What if we as a species are misperceiving cancer as a Bad Thing? Perhaps it is our bodies evolutionarily “experimenting” with perpetual life algorithms that avoid the “senior citizen” stage of life where all of your body’s parts tend to go to crap.
Why we perceive the cancer as bad is that perpetual life is a very difficult problem to solve without venturing into the realm of “horrible mutations”.
Lots of people get cancer and lots of people die. Those versions of immortality were clearly flawed and thus evolution “tries” again with different variations until something works.
Just something neat to think about.
It’s along the lines of the right idea. An interesting area of study is why the cancer cells cross the threshold into overproduction instead of toeing the line patiently and not killing their host. Their feedback mechanisms might be so screwed up that they do not have any clue.
The problem with traditional chemo is that if it does not destroy all of the cancer cells, the ones remaining are probably pretty screwed up and capable of living through a nuclear explosion. Thus this is usually why remission can be so deadly. It’s like hyperselection for the best and beastliest.