161–170 of 207 posts
Alphafold is not mentioned in the article, I didn't notice anything especially related to it mentioned in it either. I think Alphafold is a pretty insightful as a mental model, for thinking about how AI might help with curing cancers.
only in spewing obviously leftist talking points.
Such a bloated, meandering, poor written article. Just get to the point. Gave up halfway through and author still hadn't addressed the title.
The article completely misses the essential mechanism behind the advancement of science, like cures for disease. Advancing science is not about making better use of the info you have. It's about gathering NEW info you didn't have before and then using it to propose a novel mechanism of action or a hypothesis leading to a better theory. But AI cannot gather new info. Only better sensors can do that. Without gathering…
First, this article is about medicine, not science, so I'm not sure that the critique is well targeted. Your critique might apply to an article written about the use of AI/ML in science, in which case it would be uninformed - algorithms like DeepVariant, DeepConsensus, and AlphaFold are fundamental AI-enabled tools for gathering and interpreting new information from existing sensors that changed the state of the art…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Climate change is easy to solve: build fusion reactors which are 50x cheaper per kW to deploy than solar. That just kicks the can down the road. If our general strategy (aim for exponential growth in all things) remains the same, cheaper power will mean we use more of it. Even if we completely phase out CO₂-releasing energy sources, the waste heat of our industrial processes would eventually dominate the power rece…
At some point the sun is supposed to go red giant and eat the earth. Anything that can last at least that long is effectively unlimited.
https://www.science.org/content/article/giant-project-will-c...
I think these general statements are fine. I believe that AI will cure long COVID and ME/CFS soon.
I have already seen AI predict these illnesses with outstanding accuracy with no known biomarkers identified, drugs and molecules being found to neutralize it, and even new parts of the virus being identified to target.
I feel like this is the most exciting time to have one of these illnesses, cancer included. We may indeed find a cure for everything. Or at least everything we amply fund with billions of dollars.
We just entered the golden age of immune-cell therapies. I just can’t even imagine what we will do in the next ten years.
The 'what AI is trying to solve is not the problem' viewpoint of this article is also in the same vein, in that current AI discourse does not account for our society and systems.
Unfortunately as a non-specialist techno-optimist, I can't help but view it as a problem to be solved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early This is, to some extent, misleading. I mean, earlier treatment is beneficial, but there's a significant confound. All else being equal, if a cancer is less aggressive and slowly growing it is more likely to be detected early. Put in other terms, the cancers detected earlier by screening are a very different popul…
Sure, but my understanding is that for many types of cancer, detecting that specific cancer early does make a big difference. It can be the difference between a single, minimally invasive surgery to remove a tiny rumour that hasn’t spread, that can be effective even without chemo/radiation/etc., and stage 4 cancer that has spread a tonne where even with extensive chemo/radiation/etc., your chances aren’t good.
The problem is, this is hard to measure. We know that "detected early" correlates with better long term outcomes. But "early" means "smaller and with less spread" which in turn is strongly correlated with "growing slower and spreading less".
We've had unpleasant surprises where e.g. extending screening to earlier ages detects more cancers but doesn't decrease the number of people dying from that type of cancer because of these confounds.
I do think AI has a chance to make healthcare, for cancer and other diseases, a lot more proactive. Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early, we do essentially nothing to catch it early. My understanding is that this is because: 1. Administering regular MRIs, blood panels, etc. is expensive, in terms of the initial data collection 2. It’s also expensive,…
> Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early, 5. Diagnosing cancer/disease early does not necessarily improve outcomes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_time_bias > we do essentially nothing to catch it early. Huh? That’s the whole point of cancer screening which we do a lot of in the West. The benefit of whi…
> While we have some proactive screening for some types of cancer, the status quo for many types of cancer/patients is “wait until the cancer has spread enough that the patient is experiencing significant symptoms, with no systematic way to detect cancer early.”
Maybe it depends on where you are, but where I am (Vancouver BC, Canada), the above is true. Proactive cancer screening is quite limited here. I believe it's limited to screening for cervical, breast, colon and prostate cancer, plus lung cancer for 55+ year old smokers who smoked for at least 20 years. And for even those specific cancers that are screened for, availability is limited by risk factors like age, e.g. you can't get screened for colon cancer until you're 50, that sort of thing.
There are so, so many other types of cancer and non-cancer diseases/conditions that we do not screen for at all. Plus, even for the cancers we do have screening for, it's often not frequent enough to catch more aggressive variants early - a lot of these screenings are only once every ~2-5 years. The idea of, say, proactively taking MRIs, blood panels, etc. on people, looking for early stage cancer (and other conditions) throughout the body is not something that's available. You can't even get an annual physical with a family doctor anymore, there's only screening for a handful of specific diseases, and only once you reach certain ages/risk factors.
Cancer screening starts a bit earlier for women, due to higher risk of breast and cervical cancer, but if you're a man under 50 in BC, you're really never getting any sort of medical test done ever (even simple things like blood panels) unless you go in to a doctor's office for a specific condition. I have MANY friends and family members who've been diagnosed with cancer in Canada, and almost none of it has been caught in regular screening, because the screening is so limited, its almost always been caught by the cancer spreading enough that the person goes to their doctor due to symptoms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early This is, to some extent, misleading. I mean, earlier treatment is beneficial, but there's a significant confound. All else being equal, if a cancer is less aggressive and slowly growing it is more likely to be detected early. Put in other terms, the cancers detected earlier by screening are a very different popul…
Cancer isn’t one thing and AI is an important tool that will accelerate treatment and drug development. My late wife detected a mole that was melanoma in 2019. She was within months of being cleared for observation in 2023 when two brain tumors were detected. Despite the best of care, she was gone in 6 months. If her initial treatment had been in 2024 instead of 2019, it’s 80% likely she would be around for another d…
I was speaking specifically towards screening more and detecting earlier. They have utility, but recent evidence seems to indicate that it's not nearly as much as the public assumes.