I've been meaning to write something about the M.D. Anderson announcement of "Moon Shot" programs for cancer therapies. Mostly something about how I'm very glad that they're spending a lot of time and money on this, because there are a lot of good people there, but also about how I truly hate the "Moon Shot" analogy for R&D. As has been said for years, decades. . .the Moon landing was a stupendous feat of applied engineering, but few (if any) new principles had to be discovered along the way. Attacking cancer, though, is like trying to engineer a moon landing when you're not sure where the moon is. Or what it's made out of. Or what the various kinds of rocket fuel might be. And the whole thing was made much, much worse by CNN, who proclaimed "Cure for Cancer Close" as some sort of exclusive scoop. That ridiculous situation is summed up well here . As it turns out, this was a combination of the M.D. Anderson press release and one of those "We could save more people just by applying our existing knowledge more thoroughly" angles. All in all, a really shoddy performance, which I hope had people both at CNN and M. D. Anderson burying their heads in their hands.