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Originally Posted by Tactitus
To wit, your treatment becomes worthless when one of your competitors releases a cure (or even a better/cheaper treatment).
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This ignores the possibility of collusion between competitors though (which admittedly, is staggeringly unlikely here for a whole range of reasons - not least that the scientific "props" for anyone involved in such a venture would probably - for a career scientist - be worth more than any possible financial reward for keeping quiet about it. I'm sure if you're the guy who cures cancer you never have to buy a round. Ever.)
Fortunately even if ego didn't save us, has already been said the way science works means most intermediate steps are publically available. If a cancer cure was found tomorrow then we'd have to presume it would have come out of recent developments in some area of science and even if they didn't tell anyone how they did the last bit then someone would probably figure it out. Because there would at that point be proof that the prize existed (and was obviously within reach) the amount of funding available for research would increase dramatically.
The only way I can see that you would have a situation where an individual would remain the only holder of such a "secret" (without utilising it) would be if they were confident they were decades ahead of competitors somehow - either through some unique gift of genius (unlikely) or some staggering stroke of luck (by definition, unlikely).
There's an episode of
ST : Voyager where some 20th Century guy finds technology from the 24th century and then slowly builds a tech empire out of it's parts . Along those sorts of lines you can imagine you wouldn't bother introducing your cure Day #1 - your treatment would only need to be three times as good as current methods to decimate your competitors and then once/if they caught up you could simply go to the x6 mode...and so on.
But if we're left considering time travel as one of the few possibilities of something happening, I think we're safe to assume we're OK.
