Why haven’t scientists worked it out yet?
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Cancer is cell growth where it shouldn’t be, or too much cell growth.
In all your organs, there should be an equilibrium, e.g. cells die normally and are replaced by new cells. If more cells die than grow, your organ dies. If cells just start to grow uncontrolled and don’t stop growing when they are supposed to, you got cancer. This can happen if the cells mutate and “forget” how to react to cell-growth stop signals your DNA would usually send them. Further, these mutated cells can wander off and start growing somewhere else. Like cancerous liver cells trying hard to grow liver in your lungs.
The problem lies in getting rid of the cancerous cells – and the cancerous cells only, and not like all the other cells. We have methods to destroy cells, but it is hard to differentiate a normal cell from a cancerous cell. Science has figured out methods to get rid of cancer, and the most reliable way of doing so is to recognise the cancer early (before the cancerous cells start to wander off), localise it, and attack it right then and there. By cutting it out, or by hitting it with cell-destroying radiation.
But virtually any organ in your body can be affected by cancer, like it can happen everywhere, and depending on where the cancer is at, what surrounds it, and how the cancerous cells have mutated and grown, it gets harder or easier to do so. If you got cancer in your brain, it’s not feasible to open your skull and remove the part of cancerous brain or else you’d die. If you have breast cancer, it is possible to remove the breast with the cancer without killing you in the process. The difficulty really is “how do we kill this cell growth without killing the patient?”
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