World Population Explosion. The number of people living would be much larger. Food and resources would be fewer, more expensive, and possibly lead to more famine. Would the world begin to establish limitations on the number of births allowed? Would we start issuing licenses to ‘breed’?

Would Retirement Be Affordable? The average age would increase… and therefore, the ratio of “working years” vs “retirement years” would drastically change. How long can we actually afford to live without continue to work for a living? What would happen to social security and pensions and retirement funds?

What To Cure Next? Without cancer in the picture, what would the next ‘hot disease to cure’ be? The focus would then shift stronger to heart disease? Or the a fountain of youth so we could still work?

In essence, I don’t think we’re really looking for a cure for cancer. I think we’re looking for a cure to death. We’re looking for immortality. Should it be allowed? How bad do we want our bodies to get before they give out? How many years do we want to be ‘non-contributing’ people in society? And how many children do we want to disallow the gift of life to?

Am I crazy? I don’t want to die either, but I think it’s part of life, yes?

Sure, Patrick Swayze (sp) is probably gonna bite it, but most types of cancer are survived by most folks these days.

Josh is right about the actuarial tables - they probably won’t change much, though, because, as pointed out by Jorus, there’re a lot of other things working against us.

I think the first world w/b obligated to share it, if it were practical, but as with polio, I think the rest of the world might have a bit of catching up to do with respect to the infrastructure for delivery.

You know why life expectancy keep going up, don’t you? Exactly the reason you just cited - mortality from other things keeps going down. There’s still a bell-curved time most folks die, somewhere in their 70’s, I would guess, but I’m sure that c/b Googled. So what would happen, if we were all able to live to 75 naturally but that was unnaturally extended to 120 or so for all of the population, well that would be a great burden on the Earth and we’d deplete all remaining natural resources at an astronomical rate. Not to mention the lovely war over scarce resources such as food. And that would happen quickly. I think our population would cascade down as a result, and in order to not go extinct we’d be forced to develop some type of dystopia in order to ensure the survival of our species.

Go bone up on your Star Trek. These issues were ham-handedly, but intelligently addressed in the original series.

I’ll be darned if I can remember the precise title, but I am fairly certain that Asimov wrote such a science fiction story. Or it might’ve been in the short-short anthology he edited.

Hm, I’ve worked in cancer research labs and I did not get that impression.

Otherwise, I agree pretty much with everything, particularly, that there won’t be an overnite cure, as thinking there will be one glosses over how cancer works.

So smoking would still be a high risk activity in a hypothetical cancer-free world. I agree with filmgeek above when he describes such a result as gradual, and compares it to HIV. I like this analogy because HIV is not cured, but viral levels can be knocked down such that you die of something else first (if you can afford the medication).

In the same way, cancer encompasses a wide range of diseases that won’t yield to any one cure. Remember, you need a source of variation, replication, and selective pressure to get Darwinian evolution. Cancer cells are cells that are cells which reproduce and usually lose their genomic stability, which means that a tumor may be made up of cells that are genetically different than each other. Treatments are selective pressures that will result in low numbers of resistant cells, which will reproduce until a new treatment knocks them down. So as the current case with HIV, we may develop treatments which attack several aspects of cancer cells at once to knock down levels until you die of something else, but the phrase “curing cancer” reminds me up “stopping evolution,” which requires a catastrophic event - not something one wants to be treated with.

But it won’t be an overnight and ‘all cancers’ sorta thing. It’d be one specific range at first…and the delaying of the disease. It’ll be gradual.

Look at HIV/Aids. Magic Johnson has for *years* staved off the serious complications. Whatever access he has to drugs/etc. is what’s doing it. I’m sure he’s spending serious serious dollars, and from that (and the above) we could make some great inferences.

All these drugs will be available to people who are more wealthy. Oh, you can’t afford it? Well, sucks to be your grandmother. Poorer nations? They can’t afford food (Haiti just stormed their prime minister’s palace over food.)

We can’t stop TB or Polio completely, and those are vaccinated items. All Post polio research, has essentially ’stopped.’ We beat that. With cancer it’ll be constant monitoring/offset, not a vaccine (for most of it anyway.)

Scientist are not trying to cure cancer. They’re trying to fund/further their research or get rich from such work. Think about this conspiracy theory: lets say you could inoculate people from AIDs cheaply. If you’re a drug company, doesn’t it make more financial sense to fund research that permits your drug sales, vs. the termination of the disease?

Just because you could work past 65, doesn’t mean you want to, or be capabable of such. People’s limits seem to be around the 60-70 mark where they become less physically capable of ‘doing work.’ Who will take care of these people? How about feed? How will they contribute to society beyond “they’re old and wise.”

I totally believe in the Gaia/biosphere thoughts, that something else will come along as population gets too high; deadlier viruses, and diseases that are more serious.

The real concern, would be the groups that benefit. Cigarette companies? They’d have a field day - suddenly the biggest thorn in everyone smoking - Cancer…is gone. They should be pouring cash into cancer research.

And worse yet, we’re willing to use asbestos or other carcinogen based materials…because, all we’d have to do is ‘cure’ that person.

The strained healthcare? Shattered.

But it’d make a good SF story.

Readjusted actuarial data; lower base premiums for older members to reflect the decreased mortality/morbidity rate. Insurance companies would be more likely to just adapt than to be severely unsettled by the development—market forces pretty much keep the major players competitive based on current actuarial facts of life, and a measurable change in life expectency just means adjusted premiums to stay competitive while turning a profit on the new expected claims experience.

Cigarette companies?

I think there’s a big question of here of curing cancer in the sense of effective treatment once cancer has developed and been identified in a patient, and curing cancer in a preventative fashion, as with a vaccine. If we come up with a lung cancer vaccine, Big Tobacco is off the hook and smoking rates jump.

If it’s just effective cancer treatment, people keep suing but die less.

Unemployment rates?

Or, to put it another way, retirement age?

And what about the already beleagured US Social Security program? Instead of a larger-than-normal group of normal-mortality retiree Boomers entering the system, we’d be talking about a larger-than-normal group of high-longevity retirees. That could well put a bullet in the head of the program, as viability goes. Who plans for a 55 year retirement?