I can't find the exact quote or attribution, but someone once said, as a scientist, if you can't cure cancer in mice, you may as well hang up your hat.
The quip that I heard, back in my cancer research days, was "if you have cancer, and you are a mouse, we can help you".
There was a positively awesome paper a few years back which put the problem in perspective: According to currently accepted theory, cancer is a disease which is caused by random mutations. The more cells with mutations, the greater the chance that you'll get cancer. So your cancer risk is proportional to the number of cells in your body (more candidates for mutation), to the age of those cells (more opportunities for mutagenic factors to strike the right genes in one cell or another -- this is why cancer incidence increases with age), and to the number of mutation-causing factors in your life. (Do not smoke. Seriously, quit smoking right now.)
Mice are very tiny creatures relative to humans, and they live a very short time (a three year old mouse is an old mouse). If mice had the same anti-cancer mechanisms as humans, a mouse with cancer would be vanishingly rare. As it is, it's still pretty hard to find a mouse with cancer, but it does happen -- but only because mice, who have no need for an infrastructure that will protect their cells for 70-plus years, haven't bothered to evolve the same anti-cancer mechanisms that humans have.
The upshot is that "cancer in mice" is a very different disease from "cancer in humans", so while curing cancer in mice is suggestive it is never conclusive.
One way to change the nature of this problem is to transplant human cancer cells into mice. Unfortunately, this technique only solves half the problem -- the cancer cells only make up a portion of a tumor, and their environment is very important. Worse, the mice have to be immunodeficient to make a human-cancer transplant take. That makes studies like the one cited here -- which involve the cancer-fighting activity of a mouse's own immune cells -- difficult to do with human xenografts. (I actually think that such a study is impossible, but I'm not a biologist so maybe there's a loophole I can't see.)
I really wish they could grow a self-contained human immune system in a lab the way they can grow skin tissue and (some) organs these days. It would really simplify this process.
Then again, and this is somewhat of a modest proposal: why not just use dead people [donated to science] for these tests? If you can get their immune system, all by itself, functioning again (say they're decapitated, but you've installed a pacemaker and are filtering their blood), why not use it instead of some animal's with very little resemblance?
Read the book "the easy way to quit smoking" by Alan Carr.
The reason people don't quit (explained in the book) is that they are afraid of what will happen when they quit. There are all sorts of imagined withdrawal symptoms. The first thing to realize is that smoking isn't merely a bad habit, it is a legitimate drug addiction. Smokers are addicted to nicotine. Now, even though nicotine addiction is real, the withdrawal symptoms are ridiculously mild when compared to other drugs. When a heroin addict quits, they get the shakes, fevers, cold sweats, diarrhea, barf all over the place, can't eat anything, and even get physical goose bumps. When a smoker quits, the only thing that happens is that you want another cigarette. Nicotine actually leaves your body completely in 3 days, so the actual physical withdrawal symptoms (which are just craving cigarettes) only last a long weekend. After that, you have to deal with the behavioral issues, which is easier to do if you have some sort of cognitive framework to deal with them, which is what the book I mentioned provides.
It depends on how high your level of addiction is. If you're at multiple packs a day, you definitely want to taper off, either by smoking less or consuming your nicotine in a healthier way (like gum or a patch). If you must smoke after you quit, smoke something other than nicotine. I would recommend blue lotus as a mild smokeable herb that isn't a poison.
Beyond that, there are psychiatric medications that help. The one one expressly to help quit smoking has some very odd side effects (vivid dreams and suicidal ideations). I suspect that plain old anti-depressants would also help. Ask your neighborhood psychiatrist.
