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Cancer Cured By HIV
bluefoxlucid writes "Apparently cancer has been cured, by injecting people with HIV. From the article: 'As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.' Nifty. Poorly edited run-on sentence, but nifty."
That's NOT the way a pharmaceutical company works. See this post above. I'm a cynical person, but your attitude isn't cynical, it's paranoia.
Having recently written an NSF grant proposal (for computer science), and with the details fresh in mind, here's how it works: you write about your great idea. It goes to a committee. The committee is often composed from your peers. That committee is responsible for allocating a large, but finite, amount of money to some of the proposals they receive. Your chances are substantially improved if you're a good writer. Your chances are substantially improved if someone on your team has received funding before and published good work from that funding. Your chances are substantially improved if you've done some preliminary work that shows your idea might really work. In the end, they fund about 20% of the applications that come in, so the odds are stacked against you from the start, but especially if your idea is risky. Injecting someone with HIV to cure cancer? Pretty much the definition of risky.
Furthermore, it is sometimes impossible to know ahead of time whether an idea will actually pan out or not. The story of Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays is illuminating. He discovered them because he had left a barium-painted piece of cardboard across the room when setting up an experiment. He notice a strange light out of the corner of his eye. It turns out that his experiment, which emitted X-rays, was causing the paint on the cardboard to fluoresce. "That's strange," he thought, "no light should be coming out of this..." Covering up the source of the light did not stop the paint from fluorescing. When he put his hand in front of the light source and saw the bones in his hand, he immediately locked himself in his laboratory for weeks to determine what was happening. Until he showed his wife the same trick, and he knew that someone else had seen it (she was convinced he had summoned some kind of demon), he had concluded that he had lost his mind. And this is the guy who was doing the experiment. Now, imagine the guy reading a proposal to study a "light that showed the inner workings of your body projected on a screen." Sounds crazy, especially since nobody at the time could offer and explanation for how such a light would work.
Science is a messy process, but we do our best with what we have. Sometimes people don't discover things that they could. That's just the way the world works.