81–90 of 111 posts
There have been many cures that get buried due to not being able to make money from them
Doesn't exactly sound like a money making scheme.
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Where did I say "just model with supercomputers"? Thats the biology problem it is super hard! I am literally saying that avoiding the hard problem is going to work in the general case. I would argue that radiation therapy is in this vein.
> . I would argue that radiation therapy is in this vein. Why?
Which feels like it should be true for a sufficiently targetable "laser" right?
Metastatic cancer is defined by essentially there being too many things to hit though, but therein lies the entire detail: you can't treat someone faster than they die of either the cancer or the treatment.
*Laser is being used metaphorically
What haven’t software engineers fixed all the bugs?
The "skilled", "famous" and "influential" scientists in cancer research spend almost all their time fighting for grants, undermining each other, jockeying for influence, exaggerating their own importance, publishing phony papers etc.
Underpaid novices, trainees, grad students, and postdocs with little prior experience do the actual work in the lab.
It is much, much worse than a reasonable person would imagine!
This idea of "curing cancer" as if cancer was a monolithic disease really needs to die. Cancer is just a catch-all term for somatic cell mutations that become unmanageable. There are as many ways to get "cancer" as there are ways to mutate cells into these sort of uncontrollable states. And there are cures for multiple cancers today (Imantinib, Herceptin, etc). There actually have been enormous recent strides in drug…
I respectfully disagree. Maybe our problem is that of attitude, which you also exhibit when saying "with a single, or even handful of drugs". Drugs as such may be a dead end.
Once upon a time, we decided to study cancer from a biochemical and genetic point of view and look for drugs, which may actually be suboptimal. To give an analogy, what if you tried to debug a faulty program using a beeper instead of a debugger with screen. It would be a nasty work and it would take long. This is not an intrinsic problem of software ("fundamental undebuggability of 10 thousand errors"), it is "just" a wrong approach to debugging.
We are not the only mammals, we can look around nature and learn from it. What do we see when we study cancer in other species? Mammalian species that are highly resistant to cancer (whales, bats, naked mole rats etc.) seem not to rely on drugs or their biochemical equivalents, but rather kill cancerous cells biologically, with help of their immune systems.
Notably, if a species is highly resistant to cancer, it tends to be highly resistant to all sorts of cancer at once, or, at the very least, to many sorts of cancer at once, which indicates that a common suppressive mechanism for cancer ("cure" or "preventive cure") is well within the realm of possibility and that for all their biochemical diversity, cancer cells can be universally recognized and whacked in an efficient way.
The same actually holds about young people. Our own species is highly resistant to almost all cancers at once when young, and incidence of most cancers tends to grow with age along a very similar curve, which, again, indicates some commonalities under that extreme biochemical diversity.
Most of the progress in fight against cancer in the 21st century comes from biological approaches, not from better chemicals. The chemical approach may be fundamentally flawed.
Yeah, a "cure" in form of a chemical drug is likely impossible. But a "cure" in a form of a genetic treatment etc. may well be possible.
Anyone down for adding some whale genome to theirs? :)
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Most of the body is cells. Most of cancer would be rogue cells. Cancer can be cured if you can: 1. Identify rogue cells 2. Destroy the rogue cells. You can use technology to do both and pretty much ignore biology.
> Cancer can be cured if you can: > 1. Identify rogue cells 2. Destroy the rogue cells. Oh, is that all?:D And which of those do we have the tech to do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> . I would argue that radiation therapy is in this vein. Why?
I mean I kind of get it: if the problem is tumours, just "laser" all the tumours out and problem solved right? Which feels like it should be true for a sufficiently targetable "laser" right? Metastatic cancer is defined by essentially there being too many things to hit though, but therein lies the entire detail: you can't treat someone faster than they die of either the cancer or the treatment. *Laser is being used m…
Google paraneoplastic syndromes. Cancer is rarely a problem of just tumors.
> just "laser" all the tumours out and problem solved right?
No. The tumors don't just evaporate. The treatment causes tissue necrosis. Your laser causes inflammation. Even the high tech IMRT you're picturing has those problems.
>Metastatic cancer is defined by essentially there being too many things to hit though,
Metastasis as a concept is fairly meaningless in how you're using it. There are so many more factors in treatment of various cancers that have nothing to do with the distribution. There's a lot that clinpath looks at and frankly I care much more about what's on those reports than playing where's Waldo with nodules. Frequently we assume micrometastasis just based on the cell line or other characteristics.
> therein lies the entire detail
So no.
> you can't treat someone faster than they die of either the cancer or the treatment.
Again far more consideration goes into it but I'm losing my desire to debate these contrived simplistic takes.
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Looking through his comments, I think he's young and, as tends to go with youth, frustrated. This comment elsewhere in thread suggests he may be coming around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40895503
I am not that young. If you go back far enough in the comments you will see that I completed my physics degree 15 years ago. I studied quite a bit of biology and I personally know multiple doctors. I am more bored than frustrated.
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> Cancer can be cured if you can: > 1. Identify rogue cells 2. Destroy the rogue cells. Oh, is that all?:D And which of those do we have the tech to do?
3. Don't destroy good cells
4. Reinforce control of the chemical polluters
Push to assure that as much people as possible are supplied with food and water that are clean of cancer triggering chemicals. Educate people about sunburns is useful also, but people will rarely get leukemia or pancreatic cancer by sun exposure alone.
The sad truth is that most people will not be grateful for --not having-- cancer or --not going-- into a fat accumulation spiral by chemicals breaking the body fat system. People just take this for granted, or expect somebody volunteering to do this work for free.
Is not a lack of will, is a lack of resources. Banners are still one of the most powerful tools against cancer and the most underrated one.