Where I differ with Prometheus, as covered ad nauseam in these forums, is that he thinks other approaches already on the table (or, at least, much closer than WILT) will be good enough, whereas I prefer to give cancer the respect it deserves and devise a plan B if other therapies go the way of existing ones.
I sounds like Aubrey is implying that I do not respect the seriousness of cancer. Ironically, based on his consistent disregard for calls to review the validity of WILT it is Aubrey who appears to place PR above scientifically legitimate, practicable, implementable interventions for cancer.
Firstly, what WILT sets out to do is no more sophisticated than classic cancer treatments involving chemotherapy/radiotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant. In place of chemo/radiotherapy WILT seeks to eliminate the segment of DNA that encodes the telomerase gene from every single nucleus in the body. In place of bone marrow transplants WILT seeks to supply the patient with periodic infusions of stem cells. Aubrey thinks that the frequency of these stem cell upgrades will have to be every 10 years. Astonishingly he ignores the fact that some cells in the body need to get replenished every 24 hours and without telomerase a cell can only divide for approximately 50 times before it becomes senscent. More disturbingly, he has chosen to completely disergard the consequences of deleting the telomerase gene particularly in light of new functions that have been recently atributed to it. Finally, given that such a fantastical intervention as being able to genetically engineer telomerase out of every single cell becomes possible why on earth would we resort to such unelightened intervention strategies when we have the power to gloablly modify every single cell in the body?
I will propose an alternative that is possible to be engineered with today's technology: it is known that tumorigenic cells have gene expression profiles that are not shared by non-cancer (normal) cells. Therefore it is possible to construct a viral delivery vehicle that contains an apoptosis gene that is driven by one or more cancer specific promoters. In other words this cell suicide gene will be expressed inside a a cancer cell. To make the treatment more specific, the viral delivery vehicle can be targeted only to particular types of cells based on cell surface proteins expressed in the target cancer type.
Yet even the above solution appears unnecessarily convoluted when one considers the recent discovery that cancer resistance is transferable as was recently demonstrated in a strain of completely cancer resistant mice. It is likely that within the human population, individuals exist that are variably resistant to cancer and the transfer of that resistance could be as simple as blood transfusion. Imagine rather than surgery, chemo, radiotherapy, etc. one simply has to find a tissue matched donor for a white blood cell transplant from an individual with a cancer resistant phenotype.