India, Nov. 14 -- Cancer will not be cured in the near future, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee said on Saturday, even as he pointed to remarkable progress against some forms of the disease.

In a conversation with HT's Editor-in-Chief R Sukumar during the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Mukherjee spoke about how far humans understand life, how the rush to AI risks starving basic science in the US and India, where the line on gene editing should be drawn, and why science depends on agreeing on what words mean.

On whether advances in immunotherapy, genetic sequencing and AI meant cancer could now be cured for sure, Mukherjee said: "We can say for sure we can't cure it. That I'm pretty sure about, at least in the near fut...