The phrase "conquering cancer" names a goal, not a decision. Before any goal is met, someone has to decide, again and again, that a particular result counts as progress: that a shrinking tumour on a scan, a blood test that finds more cancers, a model that predicts response or a vaccine that wakes the immune system is worth acting on. This paper asks, in Meridian's form, when a cancer research programme or a regulator should treat a result as progress worth acting on, who decides, by when, and what would make the decider revisit the decision.
It answers from ten public texts. Four are works of the United States government: two sections of the 21st Century Cures Act, the National Cancer Institute's pages on the Cancer Moonshot and the National Cancer Plan, and the FDA's page on Project Optimus. Six are openly licensed articles: on surrogate endpoints, on how many patients new drugs reach, on a blood test for many cancers, on the success rates of clinical trials, on a machine learning predictor of response and on a personalised vaccine. The paper does not use IATHEON's records, and nothing in it is medical, clinical, regulatory or investment advice.
The texts never settle the question in general. The statute names who spends and who reports, and judges its projects by whether they advance a plan. The goals and deadlines are written for programmes, not for results. The articles write the conditions for looking again as unfinished studies, untested populations and unmeasured outcomes, and they show that these conditions are often left without anyone bound to act on them. The contribution is to set these answers side by side and to show where each leaves the decision open.