You and the person mentioning 1-click are definitely off base on patent understanding.
It's true that you don't have to actually try to do the thing you patent nor that it has to actually work. However, a patent isn't an idea. It's a specific description of HOW to do accomplish something.
So your "general framework for DNA-editing based on cancer therapies" will have to include statements describe the actual process. Sometimes patents have fairly vague statements here, but, those are rarely defensible. More commonly, they balance specificity with generality.
For 1-click have a look at the patent claims https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/claims?CC...
This is not simply saying "oh, we invented the idea of a single click buying experience, nobody else can do it now." It is saying HOW they did (or would do) it and the reason Apple licensed that patent is because they did it the same way.
If someone did it in a way not described in the patent, it wouldn't be covered by the patent even if the outcome was the same. For example, the patent specifically says the server system knows info about the user. Today, you can go to many websites and 2-click order a product using Apple Pay where the server knows nothing about you. If we ignored good security practices, this could be 1 click (just skip the verification pop-up, the rest would work fine.) The patent (if it were still valid, which it is not due to expiration) would not cover this.
Now, one can still always dispute the specificity of a patent. And reading 1-click claims as a software developer, some of it may still feel "obvious," but, the reality is nobody did it before Amazon. So how obvious was it really? They go far enough to describe that the system already knew things about the user, that there was an identifier sent to relate to that info, that a single action of some kind was taken, that the system was displaying info about the product, etc.
So in your cancer therapy example, you would need a similar description of how it would work. Not down to the explicit details, but, enough to set it apart from any other similar method or approach to the same outcome.