Getting the cure rate of a cancer up to 80 percent would be big news under any circumstances. But the news is even bigger when the disease is as lethal as lung cancer, which kills an estimated 160,000 people annually in the US alone, where about 95 percent of those diagnosed with the disease currently die of it. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the study that appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine is that it doesn’t require any changes in the actual medical treatment-instead, a revolution in diagnostic capacity has allowed lung cancers to be identified so early in their progression that standard intervention can be far more effective.