That’s only because a cute for cancer is a binary result.
If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).
It's not binary. There are thousands of variants, thousands of paths to matestasis. Some cancers are already, for most intents and purposes, "cured" (prostate, thyroid, testicular etc.)
No, I don’t think this is true! “Curing cancer” is short for making progress on many aspects of many diseases. There are so many people doing productive and rewarding work that tangibly improves and lengthens lives. And alongside those, there are ineffective and dysfunctional projects that in retrospect were worse allocations of funding and skill.
If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).