I read through the article (first published in 2008, it appears) to see what issues were considered, and what the background of the article author is. "Deputy editor Thomas Goetz ([email protected]) wrote about the Personal Genome Project in issue 16.08. He has a new blog about health and medicine at www.thedecisiontree.com" is what I see at the very bottom of the article. His blog appears to be updated every once in a while, to promote the article author's 2010 book.

The article submitted here is a popular article by a layman, and popular to a fault in that it discusses trade-offs in different screening methodologies, but doesn't even introduce the reader to important concepts like sensitivity and specificity of medical tests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

It's very important that HN participants digest the article kindly submitted here with a compare-and-contrast reading of "The early detection of cancer and improved survival: More complicated than most people think"

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-early-dete...

by David Gorski, M.D., an experienced cancer researcher and experienced blogger about science-based medical decision-making for popular readers. His conclusion, "The bottom line is that the ever-earlier detection of many diseases, particularly cancer, is not necessarily an unalloyed good. As the detection threshold moves ever earlier in the course of a disease or abnormality (in the case of cancer, to ever smaller tumors all the way down to the level of clusters of cells), the apparent prevalence of the disease being screened for increases, and abnormalities that may never turn into the disease start to be detected at an increasing frequency. In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio falls precipitously," is a necessary caution in predicting the benefit of early detection of what appears to be cancer.

The American Cancer Society has a good 2012 publication, "Cancer Treatment & Survivorship: Facts & Figures 2012-2013"

http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...

that provides more details on what it means to survive a case of cancer.