It's difficult to do that because we don't even really know how many cancers there are.

Cancer is best understood as a family of tens of thousands of diseases. They're a whole range of different genetic changes that can happen which result in similar categories of symptoms and consequences. They can also be incredibly complex, such as being the result of hundreds of stacking genetic defects acquired over a lifetime. There can be a thousand varieties of one specific type of lung cancer, and they might all react differently. Some of our solutions might work on a lot of them, but others might only work on a handful. And we're at the beginning of figuring all this out.

CRISPR may eventually allow us to genetically profile a cancer and design highly targeted medications to cure them, but we don't know yet how well it will work. It may only work on a portion of them. It may have worse outcomes than chemotherapy or radiation. It's nice to think that we're going to find a magic solution to the entire problem, but things almost never work that way. I think we're going to be able to resolve a wide range of issues, but I don't think it will really cure cancer as a whole.