His other book (The Gene) is also great.

The current model allows drugs like Herceptin to be found that target the actual mechanism of action of a specific cancer (rather than just targeting the growth more generally)(https://www.amazon.com/Her-2-Making-Herceptin-Revolutionary-...).

Models can always be improved, but there's a lot of evidence that the current model is on the right path.

I suspect two likely futures for general cancer 'cures'. Both require sequencing the cancer of the patient and then determining which set of growth related mutations it has (thankfully there aren't an infinite amount).

Then you either give them a tailored drug cocktail that either inhibits or activates those specific areas (that you need to take forever like herceptin) or you use something like CRISPR to edit the code directly. Both of these methods require sequencing to be inexpensive and 'precision' medicine. Both methods are also vulnerable to future mutations.

(Also Phlogiston was attempting to explain fire, not sickness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory)