Cancer below the elbow or below the knee is medically unheard of
Actually there are soft tissue malignancies (epithelioid sarcoma; clear cell sarcoma; probably rare cases of Ewing's sarcoma) which have a predilection for the distal extremities. You perhaps have not heard of them because they're uncommon and haven't generated the same kind of political/public attention that other cancers have. They're also more difficult to treat, with fewer chemotherapeutic options than breast, colon or prostate cancer, so yes, sometimes amputations are necessary.
I thought the Luke arm was awesome when the videos for it were posted, but getting that sensory feedback is even cooler. Unfortunately with an artificial implant there's always a risk of infection, so it would be even cooler if somehow the next iteration should somehow provide a scaffolding for natural tissue to regrow...maybe we'll see that in a couple of years. Or at least we can hope.
All that's needed is the saw blades.
I've always found that a crowbar works well against these kind of machines. Failing that, I'd grab a gravity gun (better known as the zero-point energy manipulator) from the local scrapyard.
The actual subject material of organic chemistry has no direct relationship with medicine. Nobody has ever asked me to elucidate the molecular structure of protein X and synthesize it from scratch. When I started medical school with all those bloody didactic lectures, I felt as though I was at a severe disadvantage for scoffing at the biological sciences.
However, organic chemistry is as close to the 'hard' sciences (physics, math, computing, etc.) as some (most?) biology majors get. Organic chemistry mimics the learning process of medical school. During class, you're taught maybe 10 basic principles which allow you to predict and understand how molecules interact. In the lab (I mean a real synthetic organic lab where they build molecules, not the three-hour follow-the-recipe thing), one is given the opposite situation: given this molecule, how does one arrive at a set of starting materials? It is analogous to medicine. Patients don't (usually) come to the office and say, 'Doctor, I've got a pleural effusion.' They say, 'I'm short of breath' and then you have to figure out the disease. You have to be able to work backwards.
We have a saying, "Diseases don't read textbooks." Disease can present in odd ways. The old-school doctors -- the guys who actually have read their pathology and understand their disease processes -- can figure it out. Others can't. Most of the premed kids don't give a rat's ass about mechanisms. They don't care about understanding. They're focused on getting good grades and pretending to be altruistic. They don't like organic chemistry because it is 'hard' and 'difficult to get good grades'. They don't like organic chemistry because it's simply different, and consequently mentally challenging, frustrating and sometimes incomprehensible. (And smelly.)
Guess what? Organic chemistry is a pretty good preview of what medicine is like on the wards.
And as for suggestions of 'more biochemistry', I'd have to say that I haven't noticed a lot of biochemistry involved in medicine either. Most of us have forgotten, or could only give you the most basic outlines of the active site for any drug -- and that's only if the mechanism of action for a drug is known. The last time I needed to know about the Krebs cycle was...for the MCAT, I think. I'm not even sure it showed up then. I did learn about cholesterol synthesis in an organic chemistry class...now that IS relevant to today's doctor.
With respect to research -- most people are not born researchers. Most people who work at a university-affiliated 'academic' center do research because it's a condition of their employment. Truly gifted researchers are few and far between. Organic chemistry isn't human alchemy -- it can't turn a dimwit into a genius. I suppose it could help some people learn to formulate proper hypotheses and experiments.
A proper premed curriculum, IMHO, contains a good mixture of: physical sciences (calculus, algebra, STATISTICS, physics (some basic electronics and quantum mechanics)), programming (information storage, manipulation, retrieval and general problem solving skills), chemistry (organic, analytical, and physical), anatomy and physiology, English and preferably a second language (because you need to communicate with your patients and/or lawyers), basic psychology (see point above), and perhaps some biomedical ethics/philosophy/history
After learning how to think and solve problems, learning enough molecular biology, biochemistry, microbiology, etc. to be a good doctor is a relatively minor matter.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?