Science Quote by David Baltimore

Baltimore isn’t dodging the question so much as dismantling it. “When are we going to say cancer is cured?” is framed like a finish line, a moon-landing moment. His answer quietly refuses the drama because the premise is wrong: cancer isn’t a single enemy with a single surrender document. Calling it “slippery” is doing cultural work here. It punctures the heroic “war on cancer” narrative that politics, fundraising, and headline writing love, and replaces it with a biological reality that doesn’t cooperate with metaphors.

The real pivot is scale and motion: “a vast number of cells” that are “continually mutating.” Baltimore is translating modern oncology’s most inconvenient fact into plain speech: cancer is evolution happening inside you. That makes “cure” a moving target, not a promise waiting for the right breakthrough. Even when a tumor is eradicated, the conditions that allowed it - replication, mutation, selection - remain. The subtext is that progress will look less like a single triumph and more like chronic management, early detection, prevention, and many disease-specific wins rather than one grand announcement.

Context matters: Baltimore is a heavyweight in molecular biology and virology, speaking from the era when the genetic logic of cancer became clear. The intent isn’t pessimism; it’s precision. He’s warning against the rhetorical inflation that turns scientific timelines into moral tests, where not “curing” cancer implies failure. The quote insists on humility, but also on a more honest kind of hope: not the cure-all, the steady narrowing of risk and recurrence.