For doctors and patients, the Holy Grail of medicine would be a simple blood or saliva test to detect all types of cancer before symptoms or sickness appears. Doctors could screen and treat patients earlier in the course of disease. As Dr. Lisa Stempel, director of the high-risk cancer screening program at Rush University Medical Center, told the Chicago Tribune recently, “The goal of all screening is to find cancer early when we can treat it.”

But as with the Holy Grail of ancient Christian legend, an early-detection multicancer test has long eluded all who have pursued it. Like the Grail, such a test may not even exist, and if it does, it might actually be quite different from what is being sought. Despite ongoing efforts to create such an early detection test, no regulatory body in t

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