Why haven't we cured cancer yet?

Hmmm: http://www.ined.fr/fichier/t_paragraphe/27734/paragraphe_img...

It seems we've doubled our life expectancy in the last 50 years. Medicine isn't working you say?

Look, I'm bitter as much as anyone else about the state of academics. I'm ex-academic-biology and have made no bones about it, here in this thread or elsewhere. But you are seriously characterizing the entire field.

Do you know why people are dieing from cancer? Because we've cured all the other diseases that killed them off at age 40.

Think about that for a minute.

Cancer is simply your body falling apart, going off the rails and destroying itself. It's doing that because, frankly, we were never intended to live 100 years. Thanks to modern medicine, we live well past the age that normal diseases killed our ancestors.

Our reward: battling cancer, instead of tuberculosis, pnemonia, cholera, gangrene or simply fever.

Look, I'm not an idiot. I know it takes 10-20 years to develop a drug. But I also know that many of the drugs we use now were developed before any of these processes existed. Aspirin anyone? Penicillin?

All of the processes and techniques used by the present-day pharmaceutical industry are predicated on the cultural assumption that, as I said earlier, it's better to let a thousand patients die of neglect than kill one with a drug. In fact, three orders of magnitude may be understanding the asymmetry - it might as well be six.

Once you learn how to do things incredibly slowly, incredibly expensively and incredibly carefully, you're going to be completely ignorant of any way in which they might be done "fast, cheap and out of control."

Very much a parallel situation is the nuclear industry. Does it really take 20 years to design and build a nuclear reactor? Done the modern American way it does. And indeed, there's a much better argument for nuclear overregulation than cancer drug overregulation - still not a good one IMHO.

There's plenty of experience from military programs, even from the other side of the Iron Curtain, that tells us it's not that difficult, slow or expensive to build a nuclear reactor. But if you ask any nuclear professional, you'll be asking someone who knows in great detail how to build reactors the ultra-paranoid way. As far as he's concerned, that's the only way to do it.

Nobody in the pharmaceutical industry knows how to execute effectively with a short OODA loop. The knowledge and experience would have to be created, certainly at the cost of errors and lives. That's a far cry from saying that it cannot possibly exist.

Think about the way weapons are tested and deployed, not in the play wars we fight now but in a real war like WWII. Many, many soldiers in WWII died from unanticipated weapons failure. But if weapons hadn't been developed with the tightest possible OODA loop, we'd have been fighting Tiger tanks with cavalry lances.

We're not fighting a "war on cancer." The military psychology is entirely absent. We're playing a game. As an earlier poster said, "it's an exciting time to be a cancer biologist." Is it an exciting time to be a cancer patient?

I'm afraid the problem is that my standards of both intelligence and honesty are much higher than yours.

Our society has far too many scientists churning out what Kuhn called "normal science." Look at all the scientists in the '70s and '80s who performed fantastic feats of normal science to sequence some gene or other. Science and society in 2012 are precisely as advanced as they'd be if all these researchers had been driving cabs.

Well, aren't the rules of science the scientific method? Which anyone can use?

Anyone can use a paintbrush, too. Not everyone can paint a Picasso.

Regarding Aspirin, Penicillin, et al, many of those drugs are the low hanging fruit in pharmacology. We've already plundered many of the easy molecules. I would contest that many of the present-day pharmaceutical assumptions are predicated on the fact that the easy molecules have already been found.

The reason many drugs fail is not because clinical trials are too long - its because the drugs themselves prove ineffective, unsafe or both. Is a 2% increase in survival rate worth a 20% increase in mortality due to complications and side effects?

We are past the days that you can find compounds that mold poops out, and use it to cure 90% of humanity's ailments.

I certainly agree that clinical trial regulations are too long, with too much bureaucracy. They could stand to be shortened considerably. BUT, they also exist for a reason - safety is important.

Also consider the safety of the patient. Cancer patients are usually willing to try anything to avoid dieing of cancer. There needs to be some protection such that these people are not unduly taken advantage of.

There is a fine moral line between allowing people to take risky drugs to cure their disease and allowing companies to treat cancer patients as expendable hamsters.

*Side note: I am no fan of big pharma either. They are effectively marketing firms that sell pills, not research companies (anymore). But that is not really what we are discussing at present =)