81–90 of 171 posts
Someone needs to find 100% cure against this deadly disease. So much money is spent on cancer research every year and what are the results..almost zero.
Now - 5 year+ survival rates are well above 80%.
Long, long, way from zero.
Fitzgerald said "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Ebert seemed to have a knack for thinking all the thoughts simultaneously, and then getting their product onto a page: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.... http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_cat... One of t…
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.... doesn't read like he could hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.
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As it turns out, fighting cancer is hard. Really, really fucking hard. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Or rather our own cells, mutated through a million different gene changes with a million different causes. Progress is being made every day; it only seems like nothing compared to the massive multidimensional scope of the problem.
I am not quite sure that makes sense - polio is was pretty complex too and yet there weren't that many years between the early attemps by Maurice Brodie (36) and Jonas Salks success (52).
Cancer as a whole has none of those characteristics.
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Wrong, stop, I can personally name forty people working on it right now. Cancer is not a single thing, and progress is made on every front, every day.
I won't challenge you for their names, but if so many people are working on the issue, why don't we see any progress? Sure we have 30 ways to cure cancer in rats, but the best we can do for humans is either to poison them with chemicals (some of them radioactive, no less) or laser beams that are only slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells. Meanwhile we throw a fortune at the problem and throw a f…
When you say "for what?" I can only point to the aggressive variant of BC my wife was diagnosed with 3 years ago. A death sentence literally a few years ago, she is now recovered and has good prospects for a long and productive life.
This is only possible because of the "fortune" of research thrown at her particular form of cancer in recent years; but it goes deeper than that. Because of the expense of the (relatively new) treatment and limited history of efficacy/results, her specialist had to personally argue the case for her to receive the treatment with our local health authority (I am in the UK btw so perhaps this is different to the US).
As more women (hopefully) successfully recover with the use of this treatment, resistance to spend on research will hopefully fade in the face of such positive results.
From the brightest cancer researchers in the world down to the people working in your local chemotherapy unit, progress is being made at a better rate than ever before. It's just very hard work, and I don't think money and fame really come into it - there are easier ways to achieve that:)
Just two days ago, he announced he was taking a "leave of presence." Typically, I write over 200 reviews a year for the Sun-Times that are carried by Universal Press Syndicate in some 200 newspapers. Last year, I wrote the most of my career, including 306 movie reviews, a blog post or two a week, and assorted other articles. I must slow down now, which is why I'm taking what I like to call "a leave of presence." http…
http://www.theonion.com/articles/roger-ebert-hails-human-exi...
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Wow. The Fitzgerald quote is amazing. Thanks for sharing. As a kid growing up in a poor, rural community, I wasn't exposed to much intellectual writing. The exception was the reprint in the local paper of Ebert's movie reviews, and of course seeing him on one of the two channels that came in on the antenna. When so many around me thought that being dissatisfied with the intellectual equivalent of McDonald's was eliti…
It's a sad comment on society that Ebert is considered an intellectual.
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http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.... doesn't read like he could hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.
On second thought, maybe you're right; Ebert was just another down-the-middle atheist Roman Catholic.
"I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable."
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_cat...
While it might be cheap to remember a critic by something as sensationalist as a scorcher - and Ebert was of a higher caliber than to build a career on the entertainment value of them - his review of "Highlander 2" has been a favorite of mine for its good-natured bickering about the gaping holes in the film's logic: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19... (Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/201…
"Ebert judged films by their ambitions, eschewing the ivory tower: action films needed but good action while cerebral ones had a higher bar."
(Minus the quotation marks, that's 139 characters.)
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On second thought, maybe you're right; Ebert was just another down-the-middle atheist Roman Catholic.
Agnostic "I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable." http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_cat...