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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.
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 simple fact undermines the above hypothesis.
Not if they all used to die of sleeping sickness before the age of 30.
Without knowing what did kill them and at what age, the existence of these populations might equally well support the hypothesis, might it not?
What was the life expectancy of these Pacific island or pre-Western diet African populations? Did they have anything approaching "Western" medicine for coping with all their other ailments?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"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.
Death certificates are a very poor indicator of cause of death. The battle between Cancer and Apoptosis is one theory. It has some merit to it, but it also seems that tumors can be viewed as a fundamental form of life similar to a fetus having its own blood supply and largely anaerobic environment. We keep finding various pathogens in tumors and declare them to be likely causes but are probably a result not a cause. We treat "tumor burden" by lowering the number and size of tumors but we have no idea if this extends the length of life by one second or not or improves the quality of the patient's life at all. We yammer about Free Radicals but make no progress investigating its role in driving the apoptosis pathway.
Seriously, how many articles per day is Slashdot going to feature from this guy? Recently it feels at least 3 per day.
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.
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.
"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.