Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Promises and Perils of Early Cancer Detection
Current medical guidelines have us screening for only five cancers, and one at a time. A new test, from a startup called Grail, has identified fifty cancers, with a remarkably low rate of false positives.
The key insight of the ongoing research is that fragments of DNA in blood can potentially reveal the presence of malignancies before they advance to a critical stage.