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Why a Cure For Cancer Is So Elusive
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "George Johnson writes in the NYT that cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease as the No. 1 cause of death and although cancer mortality has actually been decreasing bit by bit in recent decades, the decline has been modest compared with other threats. The diseases that once killed earlier in life — bubonic plague, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis — were easier obstacles. For each there was a single infectious agent, a precise cause that could be confronted. But there are reasons to believe that cancer will remain much more resistant because it is not so much a disease as a phenomenon, the result of a basic evolutionary compromise. As a body lives and grows, its cells are constantly dividing, copying their DNA — this vast genetic library — and bequeathing it to the daughter cells. They in turn pass it to their own progeny: copies of copies of copies. Along the way, errors inevitably occur. Some are caused by carcinogens but most are random misprints. Mutations are the engine of evolution. Without them we never would have evolved. The trade-off is that every so often a certain combination will give an individual cell too much power. It begins to evolve independently of the rest of the body and like a new species thriving in an ecosystem, it grows into a cancerous tumor. 'Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you — unless you die first of something else (PDF). That would be true even in a world free from carcinogens and equipped with the most powerful medical technology,' concludes Johnson. 'Maybe someday some of us will live to be 200. But barring an elixir for immortality, a body will come to a point where it has outwitted every peril life has thrown at it. And for each added year, more mutations will have accumulated. If the heart holds out, then waiting at the end will be cancer.'"
Cancer is a whole spectrum of diseases with different causes, effects, mortality rates, etc. This question is only a little less silly than asking why we haven't cured all disease yet.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
is old age. So as other diseases are solved we have cancer moving up the list.
But barring an elixir for immortality, a body will come to a point where it has outwitted every peril life has thrown at it. And for each added year, more mutations will have accumulated. If the heart holds out, then waiting at the end will be cancer.'"
Pffft, I plan on being 100% robot by then. I'd like to see cancer bite my shiny metal ass.
This hypothesis (that cancer is inevitable, just masked by other diseases that get you first) is wrong.
There are populations where recorded cancer rates are essentially 0. Some pacific islanders, African populations before westernization of their diets (I.E. eating grain) etc. This simple fact undermines the above hypothesis.
There is also evidence that people get cancer all the time and the body deals with it.
The medical research on cancer is primarily focused on identifying the mutations and chemical pathways that cause cancer to occur and then developing chemicals to block those pathways.
So a productive approach may be to find what it is that is causing people's bodies to fail to continue to detect and correct cancers in the body. Unfortunately, that has more to do with diet than drugs and so there isn't a strong profit motive to take that vector seriously.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
remember way back when (before bacteria was the bad guy)?: "For many, many years, ulcers within the stomach were thought to be caused entirely by emotional stress". http://people.ku.edu/~jbrown/ulcer.html well, cancer, for many, many years was thought to be non-contagious. until it's not. this is the next breakthrough for the courageous researcher.
Old age... True enough, but this doesn't say much about testicular or breast cancers, who hit people in their 20s and up.
Understanding why testicular cancer, for example, can be diagnosed in kids as young as 15 might be an interesting venture, me thinks.
If you live to see 200 you will likely find yourself at some point with the option to abandon biology as we know it and its limitations. At the very least replace DNA with something more resilient: http://io9.com/5903221/meet-xna-the-first-synthetic-dna-that-evolves-like-the-real-thing
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
... and volunteers exist I'm sure the problem will be eventually solved, look at the latest (and ingenious) solution for leukemia.
DNA sequence a particular patient's cancer and normal cells (there might be dozen's of DNA sequences in any one patient) and create a drug that is keyed to the cancer cells (Need to create a "complementary" DNA sequence) and has a poison molecule (e.g. most existing anti-cancer drugs) attached, possibly protected by a transport molecule. Inject drug and wait for transport/diffusion to the cancer cells which must have access to the blood supply to survive.
This assumes quick and cheap DNA sequencing, a poison that won't cause secondary damage and possibly a transport that will protect the drug and allow the "key" to operate effectively. We're not far off all of these things.
In the 80s I read an article which claimed that cancer researchers were being overly conservative and rejecting many ideas because there was too much money to be made from private/government grants for cancer research. At the time I dismissed it as conspiracy theory. But 25 years later it appears that they may have been right.
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years. And nobody has ever had their cancer cured because someone wore a pink ribbon or yellow wristband or walked 10 kilometers.
If you are lucky, like I was, and the entire tumor can be removed surgically before it has a chance to metastasise, you'll be OK. But if the tumor is in an area where surgery is impossible, or if the cancer metastasises, in most cases you are fucked. And all the pink ribbons, yellow wristbands and 10k walks in the world won't save you.
Oh, cancer is an evolutionary compromise of multi-cellular life? Yeah, right. It's a product of mutation, but it runs counter to reproductive fitness, and it's not like our bodies don't have immune systems which reject other foreign (differently mutated) cells, so, Checkmate, moron.
If cancer is so damn inherent in the very fabric of complex life then we probably wouldn't find any species on the planet that doesn't get cancer... Like Naked Mole Rats. Some studies I've seen suggest cancer has less to do with an evolution-wide compromise, and instead may have something to do with the fact we have live young -- Which isn't intrinsic to complex life. Compared to labor and live delivery this seems a bit of a back-asswards path; Probably a product of having too big of a brain to be as overcome with instinctual drives as is required for protecting a nest, but not a big enough brain to build artificial incubators with automated laser defense systems. Well, that and maybe an advantage to survive in colder climates, or migrate during gestation. Then again isn't there eggs in Antarctica -- Penguins, eh?
So, no. Cancer exists because our immune system isn't picky enough, you dolt. Just like we use gene therapy to cure extreme allergy "bubble boy" types when they're young, we'll likely eventually be able to fix up our immune system with a way to sick our own white blood cells on cancer, or cause our bodies to produce anti-cancer sugar in our cellular matrix like the naked mole-rats do.
So, yeah, it seems this fool is just ignorant of the very field they're researching. That's what happens when you over-specialize: You're likely to think your own studies are so damn important that you develop a penchant for making grandiose claims that seem moronic to everyone else even remotely in the know. When combined with a largely ignorant populace (who specialized in other fields) it's a breeding ground for this sort of stupidity.
I guess Heather did, but why did she never disclose what the Kergan did?
And I guess maybe Freddie Mercury did, but he was doing it wrong.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"It's more lucrative to treat a disease than it is to cure it."
While true at face value, the implication here is that a "cancer cabal" profits as a whole when cures are withheld and it collectively decides to release only incrementally improved treatments. But there is no such cabal, quite the opposite, there is intense competition among researchers and pharma companies and no collective decision, only individuals more than willing to "break the ranks".
Heck, curing a single type of cancer say prostate or leukemia will guarantee you a Nobel prize and a life time of doing whatever you want whenever you want both from a professional and personal point of view - regardless if the cure is monetizable (patentable) or not. And you expect us to believe researchers are actively hiding cures for the sake of the pharma industry ? Please, not even the Mafia can command such allegiance.
In this world most pharmas would sell you each base pair at a time. If you would be able to quell the mechanism that mutates DNA then we could live in perpetuity at the point you stopped mutating DNA. Then we would have to buy time in units and have our remaining show up on a tattoo.... umm well never mind.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Seriously, how many articles per day is Slashdot going to feature from this guy? Recently it feels at least 3 per day.
Some are caused by carcinogens but most are random misprints.
/. summary also mentions that cancer is about to overtake heart disease as the number 1 cause of death. Accordingly, can we deduce that increase of lifespan is increasing relatively faster than the increase of environmental causes of cancer? I would sincerely like to believe that, but the ./ summary is not enough for me to adopt such an optimistic view.
It seems there is some research pointing to the contrary.
The
Can anyone here please provide some sources supporting the view that the current cancer epidemic is being driven by increased longevity and not environmental causes?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
A strong immune system keeps cancer at bay - this is a duh.
But our lifestyles are increasingly focused on pathogen and stressor avoidance instead of encountering and overcoming them. Most people look at me as if I'm crazy when I say I like going out in the cold because it's good for me, and as many think I'm a kook when I ask them if they have ever drank water from a stream. Activities in the outside world boost our immunity, and we perform them less and less, and de-germ our environments more and more. I, for one, think there is a correlation.
Sent from my ENIAC
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years. And nobody has ever had their cancer cured because someone wore a pink ribbon or yellow wristband or walked 10 kilometers.
If you had bothered to actually read even the slashdot article (you don't even need the links), you would understand why the number of people dying of cancer increases. Everyone who has died so far has died of something. Many of the causes people were dying of, we have minimalized or fully eliminated in the last 150 years, Nearly no one dies of the bubonic plague anymore for instance, and most of the other infections are in retreat. With every cause we eliminate, all the remaining causes get a bigger share. And in the end, there are two main causes remaining: coronary diseases and cancer. Everyone of us, given that he dies not of anything else before, will in the end die of either coronary diseases or cancer, which means that they will increase their share, if we further eliminate the other causes for an premature death.
What is actually increasing is the average age humans die because of coronary diseases or cancer. That means, we are able to push the time further away, when cancer or coronary diseases will get us.
Why do you think Vitamin C injections have been banned? Or: http://youtu.be/_nm7nqUigFA
Is the cure elusive because they're digging in the wrong place?
This article seems wedded to the somatic (gene) theory of cancer.
What if it's a metabolic disease (Warburg, Seyfried)?
Seyfried has a 2012 textbook, but here's a concise summary:
http://ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S0002-9440%2813%2900653-6/fulltext
If so, the top treatment, calorie-restricted ketogenic diet, is something that sufferers can try at home. I suspect many are, and I would expect anecdotes to become data in a few years.
Of course, many people are on keto (and just low carb) diets for unrelated reasons. It will take a little longer to learn if this confers improved immunity to the big C.
No, it's not. Appendicitis can be treated with antibiotics and hope, or cured with an appendectomy. Guess which one we do?
As someone who has had cancer, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, all the various cancer charities are complete frauds. Despite taking in untold Billions of dollars, the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years.
That is a statistical fallacy, if we're getting better at treating cancer but even better at treating non-cancer diseases and injuries the relative share of cancer deaths may go up. Most of the people diagnosed with cancer are quite old and while we're getting better at emulating the body's "functions" with artificial hearts, artificial lungs, dialysis machines and so on we're not making the same kind of progress on cancer. I've had several ill and frail relatives but modern medicine kept them alive until the cancer got them, I consider it more of a success than a failure of the medical system. Eventually everybody dies from something.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In some sense, increasing cancer mortality likely results from people in industrialized nations being killed less often by other stuff (cars, emphysema, smallpox, contaminated water). And walking 10 km (on a regular basis) probably has significantly decreased cancer mortality, probably by changes in hormone balance and metabolism. Cancer research may not always be flashy, but they do seem to dig up useful stuff over time.
So how do the conspiracy theories explain the dramatic improvement in survival rates in those cancers where research-guided improvements in treatment have been very successful?:
https://www.stjude.org/stjude/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=5b25e64c5b470110VgnVCM1000001e0215acRCRD
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15726810
Clearly there's a great deal to be done, and finding 'cures' is a very complex and difficult task. But we finally have the tools to do this in a systematic and rational way, and targeted therapies are already emerging.
"Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you â" unless you die first of else" Isn't that true of everything: "Given a long enough life, [tetanus] will eventually kill you â" unless you die first of something else "
> Appendicitis
I'm not so convinced that that's a disease, although I imagine it's quite painful.
The error rate in DNA replication probably is the result of some amount of evolutionary pressure that trades off cancer against the ability of a species to adapt to new conditions. The "optimum" may not be what we want it to be. It is conceivable that we could modify the DNA replication process to reduce the error rate and thereby reduce the cancer rate.
I'm NOT saying its easy, or even possible, but cancer may not be absolutely inevitable.
... dying of something else first.
At least that's how I read the article.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned. Natural selection doesn't care one bit about what happens to you after you procreate (the male preying mantis is a perfect example of this)
Cancer usually doesn't affect people until well after the age at which they would have reproduced, and as a result wouldn't be filtered-out by natural selection.
A better example of this is sickle cell anemia, a hereditary mutation that eventually kills the person who has it. However, this mutation also grants the person complete immunity to malaria, making it more likely that a sickle-cell individual will survive enough to reproduce in a malaria-infested environment than a non-sickle-cell person would have.
You are correct in saying that the immune system SHOULD be fighting this, but what is the incentive (for the species) in survival terms? You still lived long enough to reproduce, and that is the only thing your DNA cares about.
Maybe, some day, we can find a way retrain the immune system to fight cancer, but such an ability is not going to naturally evolve on it's own
As written, the phrase "everyone will get cancer unless they die of something else first" is a tautology and therefore meaningless.
However, your point that for some people, they would probably have to live a long long long time (think, thousands of years or longer) before they got cancer and (naively) assuming there was no further advances in medicine most assuredly would die of something else first is well taken.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That makes it harder to deal with.
What some people seem to forget is that we dealt with the easy stuff in medicine already. We are getting to tougher and tougher problems to tackle, hence why it takes longer and more research to deal with.
Cancer is very tricky. As you note it is a type of issue, not a single disease (much like the flu is a type of viral infection, not a single virus) and it really is the body turning against itself, it isn't an outside pathogen that can be dealt with.
In case you haven't noticed, medical science (which is primarily undertaken in the US by pharmaceutical companies and universities receiving large corporate endowments), is primarily concerned with treatments, not cures.
A cured patient is no longer a paying customer. A patient under treatment (and his/her insurer) can be milked indefinitely.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Or ponies. Ponies will kill you if nothing else does.
Cancer is a symptom not a cause, so it is tricky to fight it. Removing symptoms does not stop more symptoms from coming along. The other reality is that we help more people to survive that would normally would not, which was how natural selection cleaned out the gene pool. So we use technology to make up for it, but it is a battle with a negative feedback loop.
...is to improve on the built-in error correction.
This is actually very, very hard. Some, but not all, "jumping genes" and relocated genes need to be able to move freely. But not to just anywhere - some places are good, some places will trigger genetic disease. And it's not possible to be 100% sure if those places are fixed or vary according to some other state of some other mechanism.
So cancers caused by gene relocation aren't preventable at this time.
Mutations within a gene are easier. There are no (currently) known mechanisms that modify genes on-the-fly. Metadata, yes. Controls for gene interpretation, yes. Gene coding, no. So you want error correction codes per gene, independent of location in the genome. This will stop transcription cancers.
But ECCs have to be controlled. You want to stop ordinary cells mutating, not cells relating to next generation stuff - you don't want to stop evolution, just keep it to where it should be.
This means certain transcription cancers will happen, but you'll have reduced most of them.
Killing rapid cancers is easy - they consume resources far faster than regular cells, so you want a poison that accumulates fast in cancers and slow elsewhere. We do that already, but the targeting is being worked on.
Slow cancers are difficult, you probably need cell repair.
Ok, so how to embed ECCs? There are vacuelles in cells that contain nothing but used to contain something. Obviously, you'd put the codes in one of those. Nanotech will do the rest when invented.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He's thinking about it all backwards. The person is not the left hand or the right hand. Not the feet, not the legs. You aren't your earlobe or your eye. Replace all the cells, everything, with new, better programmed, cells. Transfer the person into the new body. Bingo - cancer is cured.
It's more lucrative _to some_. To the patients, it' can be very expensive, and to society as a whole, it's very expensive indeed. The chance at a Nobel Prize could easily overwhelm the pharmaceutical shortsightedness if someone finds the cure but is worried about retaining funding if they publish.
Cancer is revenue generating. Finding a cure ins't in the best interest for lots of people.
This is completely wrong for both private industry and academia. If a corporation finds the cure they will have a complete monopoly for the duration of their patent. Without a cure they are left to compete with a deluge of companies that all have similar ineffective therapies.
This is also completely wrong for academia. The PI who cures cancer will be make the greatest contribution to medicine of the 21st century, a Nobel laureate, get offers for the highest and most well paid positions in academia, and get guaranteed funding for life.
What on earth are you talking about?!?
And in the end, there are two main causes remaining: coronary diseases and cancer.
Kindda like Wal-Mart and Amazon. Anyway, it's nice that a cure for KMart has already been approved, and a cure for Best Buy is currently in medical trials.
for an example. So if you broke your leg because you fell off a ladder I'd expect the over all treatment to be a bit different than if you broke your leg because you have Osteoporosis. Come to think of it you could also break your leg because you have a tumor in the leg, that would be a VERY different treatment.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
They in turn pass it to their own progeny: copies of copies of copies. Along the way, errors inevitably occur. Some are caused by carcinogens but most are random misprints. Mutations are the engine of evolution.
Finally, an explanation for all those dupes here on Slashdot! It's somehow the price we pay for evolution.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned. Natural selection doesn't care one bit about what happens to you after you procreate (the male preying mantis is a perfect example of this)
That is complete nonsense.
Males can father children up to age of 70, if not longer. Females till 40 / 45. The more children you have the higher is the chance your genes get distributed and stay "alive".
There is no magical "natural selection" stopping just because you are over age of 25.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned. Natural selection doesn't care one bit about what happens to you after you procreate (the male preying mantis is a perfect example of this)
Hey, dipshit. The mutation of cells replicating in the body has fuck all to do with the reproductive cell mutations that evolution is concerned with. What a nitwit.
The WHO says it is. Broken bones are diseases, too.
"Reproductive fitness" ends at about age 25 as far as evolution is concerned.
Please explain how natural selection cares not about those born as my little brother to a 35 year old mother and a 45 year old father. So, are you saying that longevity and quantity of offspring have nothing to do with breeding. Are you seriously presenting that once you hit 25 or so evolution doesn't care about how long you can viably produce children for? And for the record, you idiot, evolution doesn't care about fucking one bit. Evolution cares about the quantity an SURVIVABILITY of OFFSPRING -- I might point out that care and raising of offspring extends well beyond the act of a good screw. If you seriously believe that evolution doesn't care about your body after you've popped a kid out, then you're a fucking moron, sorry, you are.
I have a feeling that one day in the distant future people will read our current understanding of cancer as laid out in the summary and shake their heads that our understanding was ever so limited the same way we do when reading how bleeding patients out was the cure for just about everything in ancient times.
Also, agreed with a Cold Fjord post and if I have learned anything from the /. is that is an unforgivable use of mod points (or something like that)
but if you fixed every other problem you would start to get cancer at some point in their lifespan
I'm not sure you're following along. If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer. A mutation can occur, sure, but if the mutant cells that would form a cancer by replicating unchecked are killed by your body before they can do so, then yes, you can actually never get cancer. If the DNA replication itself had a bit more CRC checking going on -- possibly even by the surrounding cells themselves, then the cancer can't form. You want to equate cancer to individual cells being mutants in a specific way, but that's not what cancer is. It's a bit more persistent than a single cell division and death. Those do happen by the way, and we don't call them cancer.
Yes, but at the same time they would be putting most of their friends and peers out of a job.
But I never said that I believed that this less money overall for a cure was stagnating the development for one, just that obviously as a whole the industry would suffer if one was ever created.
But at the same time, you could argue that a cure would even be less advantageous to a small research team/pharmaceutical than one more slightly more effective, super expensive, longitudinal treatment regimen. Just being the latest name in cancer treatment, where every single person with cancer/a specific type is lining up to give your company everything for a 1% higher success rate would be just as good and better in some ways at least for your career.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"runs counter to reproductive fitness"
Wrong. There is a huge reproductive fitness bonus for getting old useless people out of the way as quickly as possible, and more specifically a huge natural selection bonus for death after some maximum amount of years. Death is one of the major pillars of natural selection, and cancer, in many species plays a big part to ensure that we do not too many people living to 80-100+ or comparable.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The article says that errors in the DNA copying mechanism are eventually degrading the DNA to the point where cells become cancerous. So what if the solution is to improve the copying mechanism? After all, there are people who live well into their 100s and there are populations that have very little cancer. So why not examine the copy mechanism of those people to figure out why theirs works better?
But on the other hand, there are already way too many people around as it is and far too many Ship B people. I think you'd have to figure out interstellar travel before you enable a population explosion.
Transplant cancer tissue from one cancer patient to another. It will be like an organ to be rejected by the immune system. With luck, the immune response won't be specific enough to deal only with the alien cancer. Both alien and native (rebel civilians) will be fought by the "soldiers" when they enter combat mode. Researchers are trying to treat cancer just by raising body temperature to stimulate the immune system. My approach is more specific than that.
We all get cancer many times in our lives, but our immune system normally eliminates it without our awareness of the close call. The problem with most cancers is that they are not cause by something present, a mutagenic virus, for example. Instead they result from something absent, a healthy, raring-to-go immune system. Therefore the focus should be on boosting the immune system.
Hey, dipshit. The mutation of cells replicating in the body has fuck all to do with the reproductive cell mutations that evolution is concerned with.
Please go read "The Selfish Gene" and then get back to us.
Whoa, that's news to me. I was under impression that we had virtually no treatment, other than symptomatic support, for viral illnesses such as influenza, common cold, mononucleosis and many others. We do have immunizations that provide a small measure of protection against acquiring some of these, and public health measures (like hand washing and wearing masks in Asian countries) that slow down their spread. But once a person gets one of those viruses - all modern medicine can do is say "there-there". I just spent 3 weeks fighting off a most miserable flu (it still isn't quite gone) and all doctors could do is recommend "bed rest". I think we are overstating our disease fighting abilities here, never mind cancer.
'Given a LONG ENOUGH life, cancer will eventually kill you ..."
So how long is that? It seems that Ming the Clam wasn't there yet.
http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/worlds-oldest-clam-killed-scientists-507-years-old
"World's oldest clam KILLED BY SCIENTISTS at 507 years old"
Oh, cancer is an evolutionary compromise of multi-cellular life? Yeah, right. It's a product of mutation, but it runs counter to reproductive fitness, and it's not like our bodies don't have immune systems which reject other foreign (differently mutated) cells, so, Checkmate, moron.
A lot of crack pottery going on around here...
Anyway, evolution may certainly favor cancer-susceptibility for any number of reasons. A mutation that makes you more fit to produce young during your own relative youth could trigger an increase in cancers later.
The more likely explanation is that most people have historically died of something other than cancer and long after they produced their offspring, making cancer a complete non-entity as far as evolutionary fitness goes. We simply haven't lived in a way that makes anti-cancer (or anti-obesity or anti-heart-disease) a factor for near long enough to have evolution drive us in that direction.
Yes, naked mole rats don't tend to get cancer but that's literally one in a million. The vast majority of species are perfectly susceptible to it, they just don't live long enough in the wild for the issue to pop up.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Yes, but at the same time they would be putting most of their friends and peers out of a job.
And saving themselves and their families from a painful death. Which do you think researchers think is more important?
Based on the number of insults you fling and your ability to "checkmate" you are clearly far more qualified than the people who competed for and earned grant money to pursue the very research you disparage. Obviously if you use enough rude adjectives, people must bow to your superior logic!
But while we're talking:
- mutations in chromosomes passed on to offspring are, in fact, related to the notion of 'evolution'
- characterizing foreign entities as merely "differently mutated" cells is a criminally gross understatement
- your naked mole rat article is interesting but the claim your support it with is a hasty generalization; odd you say "probably wouldn't find any..." but your assertion is absolute
- an 'improved' immune system which better detects cancerous cells wouldn't prevent those cells from developing in the first place, right? do you realize how circular that "cancer exists because..." argument is?
That said, you are so obviously right about "over-specialization". How on earth can we trust someone who knows that much about the topic of which they speak? Clearly, the less knowledge you have of a topic the less ignorant and more qualified you are! I, for one, am waiting for you to receive your well-deserved Nobel Prize in Everything.
Your humble doltish, dipshit nitwit,
EngnrFrmrlyKnownAsAC
P.S. What the hell does brain size and penguin eggs have to do with cancer?
Howdy howdy howdy
"the number of people dying from cancer has increased, not decreased over the last 20 years."
What else did you expect? As long as you are doomed to die, if you could die due to A, B and C in the past and you can't die due to A or B anymore, net result is that you are forcibly going to die due to C.
The secondary fact that there has been no single year in the last century (wars taken apart) when life expectancy has decreased implies that things are going better *even* with regards to C.
Please explain how natural selection cares not about those born as my little brother to a 35 year old mother and a 45 year old father.
The OP didn't mean for the age of 25 to be an absolute maximum.
As humans evolved, having children after the age of 25-30 was pretty rare. The point still stands that longevity beyond reproductive/rearing age is rarely an evolutionary advantage.
Once you've salved all the other questions change the premiss. Instead of answering how to cure cancer just eliminate cancer and start afresh with a brand new body to house the memories of the personality.
In time, decades, centuries, you'll wear out this body. Build a new one and transfer into that one.
Each time you transfer take some time to weed out the chaff from your mind, your personality, get some more education, go into the new body a better person.
Store the data digitally and you can keep doing this with better and better genetics each time.
Immortality awaits. Cancer is a mere annoyance.
The point still stands that longevity beyond reproductive/rearing age is rarely an evolutionary advantage.
This is plausible in the case of an individual, but I put forth the theory that it is NOT true at a macro level -- that 'tribes' (communities, if you prefer) with long-lived members (well beyond reproductive age) would benefit from greater care, knowledge, & experience and would thrive better than tribes that died shortly after reproduction stopped being viable. In this way evolution would not select specific genes for longevity, but rather select populations that carried genes that promoted long healthy lives.
IANA[whoever studies this kind of stuff] so I have no idea if anyone has researched such a theory, but it seems imminently plausible to me that a tribe with members ranging from 0-120 years of age could be more successful than a tribe with members only aging until 30 before dying. More members to hunt, gather, share "eat this not that" type of knowledge, know/remember important environmental events and geographic locations, etc.
If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer.
True - except that it's reasonable to assume that even in a perfectly healthy system, immune function decreases and cell mutations increase with age. So at some point more cells will be mutating than the immune system is able to keep up with. Keep boosting the immune system and reducing causes for mutations and you kick that can down the road, but you can't eliminate that intersection.
I guess you could possibly kick it past some other biological deadline (eg running out of telomeres, perhaps?), effectively "preventing cancer"? Until we figure out how to lengthen telomeres.
Always look on the bright side of life!
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
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Paranoia nonsense talk. This is like saying the only reason we don't have Star Trekesque transporters is because it would put the auto manufacturers out of business.
True fact: Your words are those that I hear all the time from paranoiacs and kooks. Let me guess, you use words like "big pharma" and the pejorative "white coats" all the time, right?
Nope. It's sad, but modern medicine is more about the mercedes than the miracles.
I'm not going to argue that we haven't gotten better at treating cancer. I know in my lifetime, breast cancer has gone from a death sentence to a disease that I currently know several women who have gotten it and lived. Leukemia is another one. When I was a kid, leukemia meant you were definitely going to die soon.
That being said, the fact that there are not a bunch of expensive cars at cancer research facilities doesn't mean that there isn't unethical behavior chasing money. There are not a lot of expensive cars in McDonald's parking lots either. I'm not arguing that researchers are or are not ethical. I'm just pointing out that your rebuttal is flawed.
So what Dawkins pointed out over three decades ago and has been considered as generally accepted and uncontroversial for most of that time is all wrong? Ah, the things one learns from random slahdotters!
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I wish I had mod points. Please mod parent up.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The reason we don't lay eggs is that developing human beings need to much support from the mother's body for it to work. Large brains and complex bodies require lots of nutrients and a good blood supply early on, and in any case the egg would have to be massive.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nanomachines, son. Every baby gets a dose and they supervise the internals, nip cancerous cells etc the moment they appear. The only thing is the nanomachines are self replicating so we could just end up replacing cancer with robo-cancer but then at least we might get cool glowy eyes and stuff out of it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
homeopathic quack
Redundant.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There is no suppression of already-discovered cures, that's pretty obvious. But could it be that possible cures receive less R&D investment than they "deserve" based on their projected future value to patients? That seems more reasonable.
Given a long enough life, cancer will eventually kill you — unless you die first of something else
Well, duh, if you can't die of anything but cancer, then I guess when you die it will be because of cancer.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Also, in 50 years from now there will be far less people dying from cancer -- as antibiotics will become gradually inefficient against most infections, dying from cancer will probably become a lesser worry.
Nope. Wrong. I'm an anesthesiologist, we do appendectomies on uninsured patients all the time.
Why is option -ectomy the default selection?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
When I was a growing up in Canada, we were bombarded on television with the slogan: "Cancer can be beaten." Google informs me that the Canadian Cancer Society unveiled this slogan on 2 January 1969.
Blasted with this slogan on TV, even when I was very young I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard coming from a technological elite. "Cancer isn't just some pathogenic disease, it's an incremental systems malfunction" I used to say to myself.
Turns out the slogan was first invented to help people seek medical attention when they discovered a possible cancer symptom, rather than freaking out and modelling their behaviour after the strong-and-silent-and-dying-inside heroes from the 1950s. By my teenage years, the use of the slogan had shifting mainly toward the appeal for funding fundamental research. This was the only version I knew.
It's not a given that the genetic system needs to decay. But there's a metabolic cost to flawless genetic replication, and evolution seems to have decided that the price is not worth paying: that which makes us immortal saps our youthful vigour. Without youthful vigour, a species risks becoming one of many, many dead-end side branches on the tree of evolution.
In the world of memes, the desire to live forever is cancer. If this meme ever succeeds in achieving its goal, it will prove fatal to the host organism—the human species.
Immortality is stasis. In order for stasis to thrive, any form of vigorous external change (evolution acting on other forms of life) must be thoroughly trampled. Immortality is the nirvana of paranoid jackboots.
It is true that there are many different types of cancer. I've often been the advocate for "you can't 'cure cancer' because it's not a single thing" , and on many levels it is not.
But I've come to change the conclusion that a single, overriding cure for most-or-all cancers is not feasable. At the root, the same basic event (uncontrolled division) is occuring. Given that there are even mammals which have developed nigh-immunity to all cancers (naked mole rats); it doesn't seem unreasonable that such a universal solution might be available to medical science at some point in the future.
As to the "accumulating mutations" problem. There's an unbroken line of cellular replication between the egg that formed you and the first DNA-based life to form in the oceans 4 billion years ago. Yes: there has been mutation in some of the clones of that cell that have terminated individual creatures over that time, making my scenerio a bit hyperbolic; but I do think that this "accumulation of mutation" within centuries is over-rated and my be (primarily) solvable as well.
If we removed non-cancer from a naked mole rat: how long before it got cancer?
But if you made it to 25 you had time to reproduce (3, 4, 5 or more times at that). Evolutionarily speaking what happens after that is irrelevant. GP's example with sickle cell anemia is spot on - it affects you to late to be filtered by natural selection. Same thing with cancer.
There is no suppression of already-discovered cures, that's pretty obvious. But could it be that possible cures receive less R&D investment than they "deserve" based on their projected future value to patients? That seems more reasonable.
Well sure, but then you're talking about an impersonal emergent phenomenon that results from how the system shakes out. That's vastly different and much more incomprehensible to the mind of one person than "a cabal of pharmacy companies are screwing us over". Conspiracy theories are helped along in their persistence because they present understandable causes ("pharmacy cabal") to real world symptoms ("no cure for cancer") when the truth ("result of emergent system") is basically incomprehensible.
From an evolutionary standpoint: the more (longer) you reproduce, the better. Also: how much education / protection / care helps in "evolution" is kinda an open question. I would bet if you have a 9, 6 and 3 year old child and die with 25, the children have worth chances compared to when you survive till 45 or even 90.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
CANCER is a billion dollar business. It would be ludicrous for any US pharmaceutical company to actually market a cure for the big 'C;. It's about profits as there is no profit in saving lives only in prolonging them. That is why it is so good that other countries whose philosophy differs in marketing cures to their communities.
Does the tattoo glow green?
Learn to love Alaska
Why can't we take a DNA sample from ourselves when we are say, 25 years old? Then at any time in our life, use a virus to infect ourselves with our younger DNA? Wouldn't that correct all the accumulated damage effectively reversing some of the aging and also curing any DNA-related illnesses?
Well, once the efficacy of current antibiotics is gone, cancer may fall down the ladder in terms of being a main cause of death...
"Mutations are the engine of evolution. Without them we never would have evolved." Please keep the state religion out of scientific discussions. Yes, DNA replication results in mutations. If these documented mutations really were 100,000,000's of years old, we would not be here: we would have mutated outselves out of existence. Yes, EVERY mutations is harmful. The state religion has no way of showing where a mutations could be beneficial, so much less is there any evidence (the stuff of real science) that it happened. Thus, cancer is incurable because we won't stop throwing carcinogens around our environment for others' bodies to not be able to deal with. There's no "good" to this one; worse, we're doing it to ourselves.
Cranky educator.
This limitation of definitely getting cancer due to not being able to beat the odds is a bad assumption at best.
At worst, it is just a way to grab headlines and get my eyes looking at advertisements on the reporter's page.
See, this same "unable to beat the odds" applies to large animals as well. The bigger an animal, the more cells, the more cells, the more chance that one of them dividing causes an irreversible cancer. Extrapolating to bigger and bigger animals, large whales should all die of cancer before they get large.
But they don't die before they get large. Some other mechanism cleans up cells that become cancerous and the same would/could apply to long lifespans.
Don't worry, if you are going to live forever, you will probably die in a car wreck sometime in your sixth century.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Husk is NOT one of the many words used to describe a group of rabbits.
Then the forest came to life, showing its true face. Rising miles above the ground, with trees for bones and and the blood of a thousand species coursing through a heart of bear skin and cougar tails, crushing all that was opposing it. But it wasn't the legs like masts of ships, or the wolverine fingers that sent the Foobars running. It was the terrifying crust of rabbits that made up its skin.
anecdotal or otherwise, because maybe you feel this is so obvious that none is needed?
Sent from my ENIAC
I guess peope dying of infectious disease for most of recorded history doesn't count?
[FUCK BETA]
We really hope you'll contribute a lot more in the distant future.
Sent from my ENIAC
If your immune system can kill off cells that have mutated -- a sort of integrity check -- then you can't get cancer.
Which would be great, except that I think there might be a more general principal at work here - something related to Entropy or Thermodynamics or something - which might place an upper limit on how reliable any machine can possibly be. Which isn't to say we couldn't make cancer much less common, but something about how many pathways lead to the development of tumours makes me think that it might be a fundamental eventual side-effect of being alive at all.
Shun cosmetics.
As per statistics many Hollywood celebrities have died due to cancer.
Casteism