There are a variety of trade-offs involved in biomedical research on cancer. This chapter focuses on reductive heuristics (Wimsatt, 1994, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary, 20, 207–274, 1997, Philosophy of Science, 64(S4), S372–S384, 2007, Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: Piecewise approximations to reality. Harvard University Press), and their role in the cancer genomes projects. The advantage of reductive heuristics is that they yield “solvable” problems and can scaffold future research; the disadvantage is that they can lead to relative conservativism. I consider this picture viz. Lakatos’s picture of progress in science and argue that the import of enterprises such as TCGA needs to be assessed viz. a larger set of heuristics than the ones Lakatos imagined, including attention to practical applications, and questions of value or social aims, as well as potential future import for scientific inquiry.