Sounds a lot like the phyles of The Diamond Age.
Am I missing out on any kind of "nutrient" by not doing it?
You may be missing out on some fun. I have to recommend "Caveman Chemistry" 's brief treatment of the subject.
Thank you for the clarification!
Nice post. Is there some subtle distinction between and I'm missing, or are they synonyms as used here?
Problems with remission previously made me broadly skeptical of the "go whack some target" approach. It seemed like every cool new drug just puts the cancer in remission until it adapts and kills you, meaning improvements to long-term survival were not great. This made me skeptical of target searches in general: Once you hit all the obvious things whatever strategy the cancer had found to survive would be too complicated to drug. In general it seemed like people were generalizing too much from approaches that make sense for non-cancer diseases, where the tissue is dysfunctional in some way, but still relatively "simple" : not actively adapting against your therapy / low entropy / closer to the happy family of the Anna Karenina principle. I assumed that some giant, paradigm-shifting change would be required to really get much farther in cancer research : something really 'out there' like Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres. But this post synthesizes things in a way that makes me more optimistic that the complexity is tractable.