We don't have a cure for breast cancer, but we do have a cure for cervical cancer, especially now that we know that's caused by a virus (hpv).
And, we have generics to prevent HIV infection, and we have promising new mRNA therapies, that were in development (with woefully little funding!) at U Penn, when this bet was being placed!
Perhaps this is unwarranted optimism in the specific case, but as a broader expression of hope in future scientific progress, the long bet wins.
> Perhaps this is unwarranted optimism in the specific case, but as a broader expression of hope in future scientific progress, the long bet wins.
Scientific progress has and will always win. However, it's almost impossible to predict which dimension/aspect of the scientific progress will accelerate. mRNA is a prime example of it.
I wish I could share this optimism, but one thing we've seen in the last year is that people will put themselves and others at risk as part of tribal signaling: "humans are motivated reasoners who alter their thinking, feeling, and behaving when thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways might upset their peers."[0]
Maybe I'm reading your statement in a different way than you intend it. The science itself is good, but if society isn't leveraging that knowledge for our own betterment, is science winning?
Are you suggesting that eliminating all possible risk to ourselves and others is somehow better? Or if there is an acceptable level of risk then please quantify it.
I put others at risk every time I drive my car. In theory I could eliminate that risk by walking everywhere, but I'm unwilling to do so.
> Are you suggesting that eliminating all possible risk to ourselves and others is somehow better?
That's not at all what I said. What I said was "people will put themselves and others at risk as part of tribal signaling".
There's risk everywhere, but adding risk as a way to signal that you're in this group and not in that group is - at least in the case of masks - contrary to scientific progress.
Scientific progress can fail in case of catastrophe (meteor destroys civilization), or if you're constrained by time (e.g. find solution to all problems before next world war starts).
Unfortunately, there are some types of cervical cancer that are not caused by HPV, but rather by underlying bad luck with genetics. But you are right we could eradicate the vast majority with HPV.
Edit: also there is a hormone called DES that was used in the past (a hormone like estrogen) that if used by mom during pregnancy increased offspring risk of cervical cancer.
I'm not an expert in CRISPR but I don't believe it is being used regularly outside of some very initial studies to human beings. Assuming you could use CRISPR to edit out a bad gene or change to a good gene, then I think yes it would work, but you have second problem.
That second problem is finding those very rare people with the inherited risk of HPV negative cervical cancer before it becomes a problem, which would require us to a point where we have full genetic screening of the entire population as a standard thing (not to mention being sure we know which genes are for sure high risk for HPV negative adenocarcinoma of the cervix, which I don't think we have a clear picture yet).
There are more types of cancer than we have organs. The practice of naming cancers after where they are found is maybe a bit misleading. Especially since the aggressive/deadly varieties tend to spread through the body. Some cancers are very treatable at this point. The hard part is usually classifying them correctly and before they do a lot of damage. Breast cancer sounds more specific than it is. The reason it's such a common location for cancer and why it used to be so deadly is that they are connected to the lymphatic system, which how a lot of aggressive cancers spread through your body. Generally very treatable but some varieties still kill young women.
Fun fact, the Pfizer corona vaccine was developed by Turkish-German women who has been working on developing a solution on fighting cancer with basically an mRNA vaccine. She pivoted to tackling corona last year but is looking to get back to tackling cancer. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...
2012 was maybe a bit optimistic but the last year has shown we can get results in under 12 months if the stakes are high enough.
Since outcomes vary so heavily depending on how early cancer is detected I wonder what scope there is for big improvements in testing. National programs for breast/cervical screening do seem to work but they're expensive (although still probably cost effective [0]) and by their nature can't be done very often. Will we ever get to the stage where we will be able to self-administer a test every 6 months to catch these things in the very earliest stages? Or is that just fantasy due to the nature of cancer?
Not a doctor, but from what I've read there are quite a lot of problems in the way:
- Lead time bias. If you discover cancers early and patients survive more, is it because you're treating better or because you discovered (and started counting) earlier?
- False positives and negatives. All tests will have them, and for low prevalence cancers it might mean that testing doesn't give too much information and just increases load on healthcare systems and puts patients through unnecessary tests and procedures.
- Indolent diseases. Extensive testing might discover tumors that don't have symptoms and are not life-threatening, so you might treat people (with the risks associated) that didn't need to be treated.
And that's if the tests themselves can be developed. Apparently there are a lot of types of cancer, each with different markers, behaviors, affecting different cells. It doesn't seem likely that a single test will be able to catch cancer in general.
It is at least partially fantasy. There are a lot of cancers that grow in the body for a while and then just die off without causing any problems. Treating those cancers would be worse then letting them be. Not to mention all the mental baggage of "I have cancer". Then there is the problem of false positives which happen with most tests.
Not all cancers grow fast. I've been told (read I'm not enough of an expert to evaluate the claim though it seems reasonable) there are some cancers that basically everybody has, but they grow so slowly that science won't worry about them until lifespans reach 150.
I forget where I saw it, but it said that the biggest predictor of whether or not you'll get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater the chance you'll get cancer.
Everyone who lives long enough will eventually get some form of cancer due to progressive accumulation of cellular damage. If you perform detailed autopsies of elderly patients who died of other causes you'll usually find some small cancerous tumors. This is one of several reasons why attempts to significantly extend maximum human lifetimes will probably fail.
Significant life extention will start with slowing the biological clock completely. Someone who is 60 will be like someone who is 30 today. If we do this right this include can er. It's not like cancer is a biological imperative.
I don't see any other way we can achieve life extention.
I don't know. I have a friend who has almost no bone in his knee area, something that was only discovered when he broke is leg. The only explanation for that is a cancer the grew for a while then died out. I don't know how common this is, just that I know of one case where it is believed to happen.
There are other cases of cancer going into remission after doctors gave up on any treatment working.
I think that the mRNA vaccines success will lead to a huge influx of universities/investors sponsoring mRNA research and techniques since they see it as something viable now(possibly initially a negative if it means less sharing).
Now combine that with decreasing DNA sequencing costs, it should put us on a path where the feasibility of cancer sequencing as a standard method of _exact_ identification and mRNA treatments targeting those identified exactly becomes standard fare within a few years (even if there probably is a bunch of cancerous mutations the number should be somewhat restricted considering much of the risks are hereditary).
I agree. We are beating cancer. One step at a time. People are waiting for a “cure for cancer” but there doesn’t seem to be one catch-all remedy. We need to celebrate the incremental improvements that we do achieve.
When it started, there are some rather interesting bets - go and look at the single and double digit bet numbers. Especially look at the qualifications of the rebuttals and their quality... and that the quality of the predictions are also up there.
Then... I want to say that they got really boring for a while as various people were using it to pitch their own business. I recall one that was about shipping fresh water somewhere via long plastic tubes on the ocean... and the predictor had a company that he was trying to get funding for to ship water on the ocean via large plastic tubes.
This bet falls into the same category of boring, pitching a product (a particular drug).
Unfortunately, Long Bets has moved from interesting wagers about the future of people and trying to get people to think about time scales beyond the next few years to something longer - as part of the Long Now foundation ( https://longnow.org ).
> Within two years, at least two or more waterbags, connected by the world's strongest zipper into a train, carrying total of at least one and one half million gallons of fresh water, will be successfully towed from Washington State, under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay, and then south to Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. ...
with the justification:
> Because the team I have assembled over the past sixteen years of pursuing this goal will make this happen. ...
That's not a bet... that's marketing.
Look at 176 for another bit of marketing.
Scroll through them and you'll find something that looks more like an obscure, unmoderated blog (with comments).
People have had unrealistic dreams to cure cancer at least since Nixon. It isn't really one disease so it is a safe bet that 'cancer' will endure even if many subtypes were eliminated.
If there is any place where people use science and technology as a religion it is the treatment of deadly diseases. People are always going to have psychological needs that they'll try to address by putting up pink ribbons on everything.
Finding a cure for cancers originating in a particular organ is at least somewhat narrower than finding a "cure for cancer", and as such probably not quite as unrealistic.
You're still right, of course, since there are still (probably, haven't checked) multiple different kinds of breast cancer, and also because no cancer is curable if it has spread wide enough.
Testicular cancer nowadays has cure rates of 90 to 95 percent or so (close to 100% for certain types, above 80% for others), thanks to chemotherapy that happens to be very effective against those kinds of tumours. So it's not an entirely unrealistic idea that you could find a cure that works in a large majority of cases if you limit yourself to something narrower than "cancer".
Of course how easy or difficult or realistic it is to find that kind of a cure even for a more limited range of cancers still depends on the type of cancer and whatever other factors there are, because, well, it is a bunch of rather different disease.
And so on. It was well known when it started. It got boring as people used it to pitch business plans and drugs by making poorly thought out "predictions" about them.
No money in that, unfortunately. Or, not enough anyway. This might be a false notion, but I'm scared that the economics simply don't work to "cure" a major disease. It's more profitable financially to provide treatment to sick people.
I hate this...yet am scared it's true.
Another notion I hate and are am afraid is true is that: even if corporations were prepared to cure cancer and take the hit, the state would be terrified of increased longevity, at least I think so.
Retirement age people are to the state, probably, what post-reproductive organisms are to evolution: dead weight that they can't "afford" to care about.
In these areas I think the incentives might be wrong, but we can probably too better somehow. No idea how that can be corrected tho... :'(
You’re verging into conspiracy territory a little too much here.
Truth is, there are good economic reasons to cure a disease or cancer: because the cure can be priced according to its (great) value.
Quick examples include:
* Hepatitis C - can now be cured in ~95% of cases. When the various drugs were released, they made many billions for the manufacturers, as the economic case for their use was clear.
* previously-untreated DLBCL (a type of lymphoma) - can be cured in ~2/3rds of patients, and many trials are ongoing (and have been run previously) to try to push this percentage higher. A treatment adding extra cures would be valued highly.
the power of that phrase conspiracy theory is amazing. As soon as I read it I started to doubt my conclusions and I was very open to what you were saying. I think because of its power such a phrase must be regarded with suspicion. I don't think it actually carries any weight in an argument, it's more of a psychological trick... like shaming, like "oh I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist because they are crazy people and if I'm a crazy person then I can't possibly be right so I better agree with what this person accusing me of being crazy is saying otherwise I'll be crazy..." and while I like your points I think the other analysis provided in other comments is also valid.
If you're using that conspiracy theory phrase I think either you're verging a little too much into below the belt territory there or maybe you doubt the point you're making so you are compensating for it with this dirty psychological trick. I'm not saying that's how it is for you that's just how it comes across for me.
If all drug companies were a cartel you'd be right, but If a single company could provide a cure they would wipe everyone out of that market and could charge enormous sums.
For example BMS had recently a CAR-T therapy approved by the FDA for myeloma, wich is not a cure yet.
The whole premise of the notion is that managing the disease is more profitable than curing it. So it is not the ones who develop a cure that wipe everyone else out of the market but rather the other way around.
Consider a disease has an effective daily pill treatment where each pill costs $.50 to make. Someone comes along with a single pill that costs $1000 to make but cures you. The cure developers have just spent a lot of money on R&D and need to make a profit on the administration of the cure, so they need to price it significantly over their production costs. The established treatment on the other hand has a war chest and can recoup short term losses in the long run, so they can afford to drop their prices or even give it away for free for a limited time. Perhaps some segment of the population will pay a hefty premium just for not having to deal with the hassle of treatment, but most people don't have thousands to spend on such a luxury and will stick with the option they can afford right now, even though it will wind up costing more over the course of their lifetime.
I think bringing healthcare insurance providers into an argument about whether there's a cartel of pharmaceutical companies artificially keeping up prices it's really not a good idea. It's possibly different in Europe but I think if you have any experience of the US system it's clear that there's some form of rorting and artificially inflated prices where the health insurance providers are in cahoots with all the providers and are somehow gouging the prices there. if you pay cash right now maybe cost you 300 if you put in your insurance the same thing maybe cost 3000 and then there's even a second order incentive effect where "health care professionals" want to give you these extra treatments if it's going through insurance.
This isn't a question of denying someone service, this is a question of what form the service takes. I am certain your health care provider won't pay 1 million dollars for a different cast design that reduces the time you wear it by 1%, nor should it. In the scenario I'm describing, both options are medically adequate, one is just more convenient but also substantially more expensive. Insurance pays for what you need, but it is quite common to deny claims which are not medically necessary.
Okay, so the insurance company would pay $10 Trillion for one person to receive the cure for that cancer then? Obviously there is a limit.
The fact is that $1000 is not the cost of producing the pill, that is the amount they can charge for the pill while still getting people to pay for it. When there is no competition, and people would die without it, prices get very high very quickly. There is an extremely large barrier to entry for new medicines, and pharmaceutical companies are structured to recoup the massive development costs by charging large sums for inexpensive to produce goods that they have essentially a monopoly over. If it costs billions of dollars to develop a cure, that cure is going to have to be expensive, but a cure administered repeatedly can amortize those costs over many low-cost doses, while a one-time cure can't. Insurance companies are all about spreading costs over time - paying out large sums to large numbers of people all at once is a lot more problematic than smaller, predictable payouts over a longer period of time. It is in their best interest as well for you to manage the disease.
I don't know yet it was approved some days ago, but i guess yes.
Cancer meds are really expensive, a four month cycle in myeloma ( where most of the time 2/3/4 drugs are combined) can cost more than 250k.
Revlimid, a maintainance drug often given for years can cost 20k a month (in India it's $150 a month).
I think it's a fallacy to say that pharmaceutical financial interests are not aligned with actually effectively curing diseases.
First, when they cure a disease we don't sudenly become immortal, it improves our life quality and expectancy and new diseases become more prevalent at a later stage, so they don't lose their jobs.
Second, even if slowing down research could effectively allow them to benefit longer from existing cures, generally you have competitors and inertia tends to not work well in adversarial conditions.
The first points are really good one. But the second point lost me because I think you can see there's actually a lot of value to be tapped in technology say by keeping software kind of shit for a long time. You end up with lots of consultants and like there's a lot of inertia in the yenterprise software industry where there's also a lot of money.
I don't think that's just because of process. I think some of it is there's profit to me made by artificially holding back innovation because then you can stretch it out over the maximum amount of time through which you can extract value from it.
Just like suppressing advanced technologies. in the public example consider like apple they must have super advanced devices that they're working on and we're not going to see them for a while because why would they bring out that generation now when they can still make a good profit from their existing product lines long into the future.
The argument is that it's more profitable to sell a pill you have to take every day for an extended period of time (or forever) than it is to sell a pill you only have to take once (or a small number of times). Recurring revenue is generally more desirable than a lump sum. There's still a strong incentive to make the disease manageable. It has nothing to do with saving money on research or keeping their jobs.
That doesn't logically follow. Why would a one time treatment win the market? Lasik is a one time treatment that certainly hasn't eliminated the market for daily contacts. The ability to buy a house hasn't eliminated the market for renting. The one time treatment has to pay for its development in a single dose, the recurring treatment can amortize its costs over many doses. In general, you will have to pay a premium for the convenience of a single dose, and many people can't justify that cost.
That's a really good point about lasik. Great example thank you. But at the same time I guess it cuts both ways because lasik exists. but what I'm specially worried about is that cures might be designed to not be perfect so that maybe you need to buy them again in 15 years or something just like a light bulb they can make perfect light bulbs but they design them to be obsolete so they can sell more. Why would not the same economics operate in the pharmaceutical industry I think it's a tragedy that it might when they should stick with their hippocratic principles.
The incentives for market-based research aren't wrong, but they do have a limit. Investors aren't going to spend ten billion dollars on research to find a cure they expect to make only one billion dollars profit from. They aren't running charities. Many other people are running charities, of course, especially for cancers. If you want to help fund them you can. Many people do. The govt also funds a ton of research.
As for the motivation to not pursue a profitable cure because you'd rather make more money from treatments, this isn't really the options you get to choose from. The real game they play is to choose either to find and sell the cure if one exists, or to sit back and watch the just-as-smart competition find and sell that cure instead of them. Their profitable treatment loses out either way.
Cancer affects many many people who are healthy otherwise and would have had many more productive years. It isn't just a disease of old age. Especially breast cancer. Either way, elderly folks are the most prolific voters, so there's the incentive situation for the govt.
I'd say pretty clearly if you hold back a cure for breast cancer because you can't get investors to put in 10 billion dollars when you're going to make one billion on it but long-term treatments for breast cancer at various stages they're going to make 100 billion on that 10 billion I'd say pretty clearly the incentives are wrong in that case. Because you're enabling research through investment which judges value purely on a monetary basis but it's ignoring the value of human life. So I'd say pretty clear that it's not just a case of the incentives having a limit, the incentives are wrong in that case.
I'd love to believe in this free market utopia where the end result is always in the best interest of the community. In reality it's well known that companies rely on cartels to protect their shared interests.
We can't know if pharmaceuticals are actively holding back any cure but it would be naive to completely trust organizations which only need to answer to their shareholders.
> This might be a false notion, but I'm scared that the economics simply don't work to "cure" a major disease. It's more profitable financially to provide treatment to sick people.
Others have provided nice arguments as to why this isn't necessarily so, but allow me to add one more that is (I hope) more likely to appeal to a cynic.
This is one area where the corporate focus on short-term profits is actually working to the long-term benefit of humans. While it would be more profitable in the long run to sit on a cure and continue to sell therapeutics indefinitely, what CEO could resist the stock-boosting effect of a cure for a major disease? What a time to exercise your options! Long-term profitability is a problem for the next guy.
I agree, I always thought that the idea that "big pharma" would be actively suppressing miracle cure for long term profit is rather improbable.
There's the reason to point out (why pass the opportunity of a huge short term profit?) but also for these types of diseases there's bound to be a high ranking officer within the company who either directly suffers from the illness or has a close family member who does. I doubt that they'd let themselves or their wives die for the sake of getting a nice +3% to benefits ten years down the line.
It is hard to believe that there isn't enough money in it. Breast cancer has a thriving industry of surgeries to remove the cancers plus reconstruction surgery plus a number of treatments associated with these surgeries. They easily run into the tens of thousands of euros a pop (if you go private in Europe, I suppose higher in the US).
I suppose you're right. But I don't necessarily think that's evidence against what I'm saying in fact I think it speaks to what I'm saying which is that curing is inherently not that profitable so there's an incentive to kind of spring up a variety and a proliferation of industries around that so that now you have you know all sorts of support services for you know remission stage or cured breast cancer survivors. I'm pretty sure that's interacting with the fact that a surgery that completely removes and cures the cancer is probably cheaper than a long-term treatment option.
Cancer does not so suitable a target for this, as say, h.i.v. infections.
Cancer is not contagious, and something that is treated in the individual case by curing it. The “cure for cancer” would thus simply be a more effective treatment than what is available now.
This is fundamentally different from h.i.v. infections, where a patient is a lifelong client, and a cure would amount to a type of treatment that would indeed completely cure the patient of the infection, and thus terminate the client.
I think what might be more likely is that if today's terminal illnesses are managed, we'll simply move the retirement age later and keep people working into their 70s.
I'm not sure that's exclusive with what I'm proposing but I definitely think that will happen and is happening even now. I'd be kind of okay with that world where the incentive to cure people is that we can extract more productive work years from them. It's kind of cynical but I think there's a lot of good probably to be had there as well and it's a step perhaps in the right direction anyway. Even if it's not that great on the face of it.
Anyone that has ever spent time in what I now call 'Cancer Inc.' will know just how absurd that statement was, whihc oddly enough was exactly when I was in it: from Undergrad to working in Diagnostics.
Cancer research is it's own entrenched entity with horrible incentives that promote stagnation and often imbecilic levels of hubris that are at it's core shielded by the general public's ignorance of biological science as well as their nearly child-like level of fantasy of what was possible back then.
As biologists we all had hopes and dreams of pursuing these seemingly insurmountable feats to make a dent in the problem, but as we went through the meat grinders of undergrad, and then the soul-crushing reality of the 'Industry' and its machinations and internal politics from the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex on which it's built on compounded with tons of debt and lowering qualities and standards of living it's no surprise so many biologists ended up quitting life sciences and going into tech--HN revealed to me many things, but also just how common that route is.
My short and sweet: Cancer is inevitable of any multi-celled organism on a long enough timeline and preventative health measures and healthy lifestyles are worth more than anything any Corp will ever sell you--they're unpopular because they require personal effort.
Eating better, sleeping more, and exercising are better alternatives but rquire effort and possible loss of economic compensation, but if do them and you know that while you are not immune to any malady you are better off than most who are betting on some miracle cure to solve all the health problems they have amassed hoping for a silver bullet.
I'm optimistic about the advances the 21st Century will usher in biology, I think the 21st century will be defined by biology in fact, but it's not something that will be egalitarian nor will it be promoted to most who haven't already have made efforts to take their health serious long ago. Most people don't even know about stem cell therapy besides what a influencer Joe Rogan told them, which is... something but still not even scratching the surface.
I find it unlikely that any cure for cancer would be so specific that it would work on breast cancer only.
Much of the rhetoric that surrounds breast and prostate cancer irks me as though it be more rooted in identity politics than medicine. — I don't think such a specific claim would easily be made about, say, colon cancer or leukæmia.
Why? Breast cancer is cancer of the breast tissue. It’s a different disease to prostate cancer, which is again a different disease to colon cancer and leukaemia.
That’s why there probably won’t be a universal “cure for cancer”.
Breast or prostate cancer are the most common cancers in women and men respectively. No matter what you identify as, if you have either breast or prostate tissue, there’s a real risk to most people. That’s why we hear about it more. We don’t hear as much about mesothelioma because it’s rarer.
I don’t think it has anything to do with identity politics and everything to do with the medicine.
Cancer comes in variants per cell type times the number of ways this cell can mutate. Each of your organs comprises a number of cell types. And for any given cell type there is often more than one place in which a mutation can cause cancer (other mutations may be harmless or cause cell death). Each of those different cancers of the same cell type may have it's own characteristic symptoms, progression and treatment.
For almost all cancers, there are common treatment options like surgery. External beam radiation can very often be used if the area is targetable. Internal radiation works far less often, but there are some specifics that make some cancers unique there, like Thyroid cells that are susceptible to radioactive iodine. Chemotherapy with cell-division-inhibiting drugs also works, but there differences really start to show, because the various cancer cells have different division rates and susceptibilities to certain inhibitors, making some chemo drug better or worse than another.
And then there are some cancers, where very specific treatments may be available, like e.g. antibodies that target those specific cancer cells since they have unique surface features that can be targeted. The more targeted the method the better, since you will have less collateral damage and can use a higher, more potent dose.
So superficially, there might seem to be three main options, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. But even those very common options can have vast differences that aren't always obvious to the layman who just gets to hear about the rough categories of treatments.
As an example, Gleevec has turned CML from a terminal cancer into a chronic, manageable condition for most patients. Life expectancy for CML is nearly the same as the general population now. [0]
But Gleevec doesn't work on prostate or breast cancer.
Cancers happen when mutations in a cell cause it to proliferate uncontrollably; the genetic circuits that need to be activated differ by cell type. For instance, prostate cancer can be treated with anti-androgens, since testosterone is required for prostate cells to reproduce. The cancer can evolve to resist anti-androgen therapy by mutating the androgen receptor so it's always stuck on. It's all circuits, and all the circuits are different.
> Why? Breast cancer is cancer of the breast tissue. It’s a different disease to prostate cancer, which is again a different disease to colon cancer and leukaemia.
Yet most cancer treatment at the moment is not so specific. The exact same drugs are used to treat many different forms of cancer[1]; lukæmia is indeed treated with the same drugs as breast cancer is.
> Breast or prostate cancer are the most common cancers in women and men respectively.
The most common form of cancer is lung cancer[2], and while breast cancer takes a second place, prostate cancer is fairly low down the list at 5. Furthermore, in terms of lethality, both take a rather strong backseat to many other forms[3]
> I don’t think it has anything to do with identity politics and everything to do with the medicine.
I see no evidence for your claim that breast cancer is so fundamentally different and the link I posted indicates that the same treatments are very much used for different locations of cancer.
Many anti-cancer drugs target cell division, or DNA replication, or something along those lines. It wouldn't be surprising that the same agents are used against different kinds of cancers (which consist of different kinds of cells/tissue), since the common factor in all kinds of cancer is uncontrolled growth.
The drugs might still be more effective against one type of cancer than against another for whatever reasons. I'm not knowledgeable of those reasons, but a bit of research might tell something about them.
Chemotherapy drugs have hiked cure rates for testicular cancer to somewhere around 90%. I think I've read that it was somewhere around 50% before the discovery of those drugs in the 1960's or 1970's. The same combinations of drugs (or some of the same drugs combined with something else) are also used for other kinds of cancer, such as ovarian or cervical cancer if my memory serves. Yet those drugs or drug combinations still aren't quite as effective against those other types of cancer as they are against testicular cancer. That's probably just a matter of them happening to work well against some specific kinds of neoplasms, not a matter of what anybody wants them to work against.
You may be right that some types of cancer get more attention because they primarily affect intimate organs, and thus provoke stronger emotions. However, for example the chemotherapy that's still used for testicular cancer was discovered decades ago, and probably has nothing to do with any kind of identity politics. TC is also rare enough that it's probably off most people's radars, and the reason it's got a ~90% cure rate is probably just that a treatment was discovered that happens to work against it.
While emotional reasons may certainly direct the general interest towards particular kinds of cancer, I disagree with your general notion that a cure for a particular kind of cancer would be for some reason less likely than a general one. On the contrary, finding a specific drug (or having a general drug work better against one or a few types of cancer than others) would be much more likely than a cure-all. There's even an example of the former, and it's not because of present-day identity politics.
> I find it unlikely that any cure for cancer would be so specific that it would work on breast cancer only.
Then allow me to introduce you to the world of personalized cancer vaccines, that can even be targeted to a specific cancer of a specific patient. Here are some readings to get you started:
Nothing in any of the literature you've shown suggests that this could lead to a cure of one specific type of cancer.
All the literature speaks of that this technique can be used to treat cancer in general, even though the treatment's nature itself relies on the specific properties of specific cancer cells as to not be as destructive as most treatments that exist today.
> Nothing in any of the literature you've shown suggests that this could lead to a cure of one specific type of cancer.
These vaccines are based on neoantigens, which, quoting the abstract of one of those articles, "are highly specific to tumours of individual patients". The technique is generally applicable to several types of cancer, but the cure will be specific to only one type.
Yes, but the technology and research will allow a cure to be developed for all types even though the cures that come from it themselves are quite specific.
It still won't lead to developing a cure for only one type of cancer.
I did not attack identity politics on frequency of occurrence, but on medical inaccuracy. — absent any attack on the accuracy of my arguments, yours is essentially an argument of. “These days, I'm seeing attacks on inaccuracy brought up more than inaccuracy.”.
It's like saying: White People do X - not only not ALL, not often not even more than one. "White People" is a label that ignores individuals and no two are the same. Sometimes similar but never the same.
Each type of cancer is as unique as each human is genetically and behaviorally. So when you "get cancer" it's not unusual for the genetic profile and identity to change as much as human genetics changes in a dozen generations for the same reasons that bacteria can evolve super quickly. Most cancer recurrences are a genetic drift that takes over "the cancer" from the prior species that has been put into remission.
This is why cancer treatments now are increasingly including full DNA sequencing to figure out exactly what sub-sub-species it is to tailor to known genetic weaknesses and treatment strengths. Honestly it's a complexity explosion rather than any type of "victory". It's proven that there never will be a victory with some type of singular "magic bullet".
And in the end, we will all die. No "transhumanism" is NEVER going to change that or save the day. It's childish and reality ignoring to believe it will.
We are actually trading between cancer and lifespan - at a molecular level. There's a scientific paper about this from maybe 10 years ago I can't find easily but that's the actual trade-off of living at all. All living things have the same trade-off.
To put in context what "we have a cure for cancer" means:
In 1993 Prof. Dr. Somlyai has discovered that cancer cells cannot tolerate low-deuterium environments (as low as 100 ppm). There is solid science behind. He and his workmate, Prof. Dr. Boros even buy the publication fee for their own scientific papers to make them available to the general public because they are open to recieve scientific criticism. The idea of deuterium depletion manifested in a therapy using deuterium depleted water, which is drank regularly or injected directly into tumors. It has been approved for animals and being used in therapy since 15 years with great success. The human experiments have succeeded to demonstrate that mentioned water significantly improves acute survival rate, and survival rate is significantly better after 1 year of treatment.
The authorities have declined to approve its use in humans because there were no significant improvement in survival rate after 3 years of treatment. So "we dont have a cure for cancer".
Life, since eucaryotic cells have appeared, thrive to deplete deuterium levels inside mitochondria because deuterium kills atpase enzyme, which produces the energy for the whole body. One method of doing this is to keep procaryote cells and fungi in the gut, which in turn tend to concentrate deuterium, which is required for their genes to multiply. Feces is therefore richer in deuterium, getting the body levels lower.
Ocean deuterium level is 155. When the water evaporizes, the steam has 2.5% - 4% less deuterium as the water. The cloud then moves around, and rains the deuterium-richer water first, leaving the deuterium depleted rain for the end. When clouds form around the equator, and they quickly fall in the form of summer thunderstorms, they tend to be higher in deuterium. But if the clouds form, move around through the poles, then back to 45 degrees latitude, they can reach the 130 ppm, which is tremenduosly good for mitochondria. We know that cancer is less prevalent as we go closer to poles.
The consequence of mitochondria having low deuterium levels is that they produce citric acid with low deuterium content, which later turns into fat. That's why lard has 118 ppm deuterium in it, which generally means that eating a ketogenic diet of such fats (and drinking as little water as needed) is super efficient in depleting deuterium in the body. It takes 2-3 months to reach the equilibrium of deuterium levels after a change in diet/lifestyle. The Wartburg-effect might be a consequence of this.
ppm is parts per million, which labels how many deuterium isotopes are present for 1000000 hydrogen atoms. So oceans have roughly one deuterium-containing water molecule every 6600 water molecules.
The above is basically what I understood researching the topic, please google Somlyai and Boros for more.
The website looks like fairly typical junk science. In general, deuterium is chemically identical to normal hydrogen, so you're going to have to provide strong evidence to back up the claims that you're making.
One deuterium ion isotope (proton+neutron) is twice as heavy as the hydrogen ion isotope (proton).
If you are claiming they are identical chemically, I think it's you who should come up with Strong Evidence.
The common sense dictates that if a particule is twice as heavy, it COULD have different properties, which can be empirically tested, in fact WAS tested. (see links above)
I'm happy to agree with all of your claims. (except the arbitrary label you applied: "junk")
Deuterium depleted water is produced by distilling water multiple times, which is extremely energy heavy operation. That's why a bottle of 1.5L 105ppm DDwater costs around $4. It is still extremely cheap if you compare to the cost of other oncology treatments.
There are minimal differences in the chemical behaviour. The very first scientific paper in the publication list shows the effects of that minimal difference. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/107327482199965... The results of deuterium depletion is what you see on Page 6: Decreased proliferation of cancer cells. In vitro studies were followed by animal experiments, which I mentioned above.
The human experiments were conducted on 22 persons. 2 of DDW consumers died, 9 in the placebo group died. This, as I see, doesn't rule out the possibility of an extremely efficient drug for cancer.
What Boros said in an interview (won't link it since it's in Hungarian) is that there's an extra fee to be paid for the authors to be able to put the papers on their own homepage as open access articles.
I don't know more details about it, but surely he can answer your question or you can find the answer in sciencedirect or whatever. I'm not familiar with the science bureaucracy machine, sorry.
There's journals that are specifically open access and there's a fee for publishing in them. Some of them are excellent. There are also publications that accept just about any paper as long as the author pays to have it published. I'm trying to figure out which kind they're publishing in. I'll see what I can figure out.
Can we please just shift the bulk medical research funding to problems like gradual replacement for eventual consciousness upload, so we can “solve” all biological diseases in one go?
Seems woefully inefficient to tackle ten thousand independent fatal ailments - and fund each effort separately - when we could be working on abandoning this frail form entirely.
It seems likely to me that solving breast cancer is easier/quicker than solving consciousness upload. If we do what you propose, a lot of people are going to die from breast cancer while we're waiting for upload to get here.
Still, solving upload is likely much easier than solving the thousands of different fatal ailments out there altogether.
These individuals are going to die of some ailment within a few decades regardless of whether breast cancer is cured. Consciousness upload is the only thing that enables a real difference for humanity.
If consciousness upload is actually practically possible. But even if it is, it's a long ways out. Even if you can't save them all, even if you can't save them permanently, don't just ignore trying to make progress on diseases that are killing real people now. Don't chase your wonderful dream to the exclusion of real progress that is definitely available if we put resources on some of those thousands of problems.
And, we have generics to prevent HIV infection, and we have promising new mRNA therapies, that were in development (with woefully little funding!) at U Penn, when this bet was being placed!
Perhaps this is unwarranted optimism in the specific case, but as a broader expression of hope in future scientific progress, the long bet wins.