Richard Feynman, shortly before he died, made it clear that he did not believe that string theory was the unique cure for the problems—the pernicious infinities, in particular—besetting a harmonious merger of gravity and quantum mechanics: My feeling has been—and I could be wrong—that there is more than one way to skin a cat. I don't think that there's only one way to get rid of the infinities. The fact that a theory gets rid of infinities is to me not a sufficient reason to believe its uniqueness.
