Both treatments kill *all* cells. The idea is to kill the cancer cells *first*, before the treatment kills the patient.
Not quite. The current generation of drugs do have a tendancy to affect any DIVIDING cells in the body, but not all of them. Big difference, your mature brain cells and your heart muscles should not directly be targeted. The fastest dividing cells in the body will generally be affected the most, that's cancer cell. It also helps that they're less stable than healthy cells and succumb to genomic damage faster. The lining of your gut, your fingernails, hair, and skin are also fast-dividing, they also will be affected, but I believe they divide slower than most cancers, and they are more resillient than cancer cells. There's also a numbers game though, cancer can be beaten back to one cell and still recover, you need most of your stomach lining intact. So you're right in that you should kill the cancer cells before you kill the patient, but it would take an extremely high dose of any chemotherapy to start killing EVERY cell in your body, and you as an organism would be dead at much lower doses.
Given how the effects would look like an auto-immune disorder, this gives totalitarian elements in "democracies" (do they actually represent ANY of us anymore?) the way to untraceably dispose of political opponents.
Crazy conspiracy theories based on undeveloped technology aside, soldiers on battlefields are not political opponents (at least not for several years). As far as applications to real intrigues, remember almost anything will give you cancer, some substances are far more potent at that than smoking. If you really wanted to take out a political opponent and wanted to make it look natural, there are far more effective and easy ways to do it. In fact, I'd bet good money that there are more effective ways to make it look like an autoimmune disease if for some reason it absolutely had to be that.
I'll wait for the results to say 100% that this would have no evil applications like what you're saying, but I will say I'm 99% sure that there are easier ways to accomplish those goals using other technology.
The human immune system is a pretty potent beast to unleash. Getting it to attack cancer cells is genius. I would be worried about side effects, specifically the immune system getting confused or over-stimulated and attacking other things, but that's just speculation and surely for highly aggressive cancers like the ones they tested in the mice the risk would be more than worth it. We already use 'cures as bad as the disease' to treat cancer.
Lets wait for the clinical trials first. If you develop minor allergies, that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make in order to get rid of a life-threatening inoperable tumor.
The bigger issue will probably be that this will kill most of the cells of the tumor, but there will be a resistant fraction of cancer cells left that will repopulate, which you could feasibly seed again I guess...
Incorporate this in bullets and you get 100% lethality.
Well in terms of pure combat standards, an injured soldier is actually worse than a dead one, since the dead one can be carried off later, wheras the injured one needs immediate medical attention.
Your body releases cytokines every time you get cut, or shot. Your immune system manages to avoid killing you in those cases, usually.
Why bother with this roundabout way anyhow? If you absolutely want to kill everyone you shoot, it would be much easier and quicker to make a poisoned bullet.
Psst, they weren't using viruses or anything contagious. Hard to see how small plastic inserts and protein could spread from person to person. Even if it did, it would cause an autoimmune disease, not reprogram you to be a vampire/zombie. And there are worse apocalypse scenarios than Will Smith hitting on mannequins.
However after RTA I did see that all of the control group died and the mice with the implant 90% were cured.
I hate to say it, but that's over-interpreting. This appears to have warded off imminent death in the mice, which is a result that is very encouraging. Unfortunately, it likely did not -cure- the mice. When we see data indicating these mice have a 5-year survival which is greater than the control (uh... or whatever the equivalent is since even healthy mice maybe don't live 5 years) then I too will be celebrating.
The immune system would sort of be vaccinated against markers on the cancer cells, but there's no guarantee that every cancer cell will have the marker and will keep it. You can imagine that if 99% of the cells in a tumor do have it, the tumor may be killed by the primed cells, but that 1% that doesn't will repopulate a while later.
Of course, this may have a feedback effect. I'm no immunologist, but I would hazard a guess that if a tumor were being attacked in this manner, the increased activity in the area may start targeting that 1% too. Maybe. That could also be a downside, as you can imagine if the immune system is primed but learns the wrong marker, you suddenly have an autoimmune disease on top of the cancer. Once again, I'm not an immunologist, so I don't know whether that's pure crap or not.
So it's another good finding, and of course a way to fight tumors is a miracle to a patient even if it's not a complete cure. It might be a total cure, but let's not set ourselves up for dissapointment.
1. Posing as someone else, post false news that own lab has made a breakthrough discovery 2. Take down the faked article before any scrutiny can be applied and it is determined to be a fake 3. ??? 4. Profit!
You're sure that's enough to fix it? I suspect the real problem and the only solution has to do with spending on law enforcement. No one ever got voted out of state office for beefing up law enforcement. I have not looked at the budget, so don't use that prediction for anything, but I'd be suprised if cutting back on federal funding would solve the problem even if that was an option.
We're a federalist republic, the federal government SHOULDN'T be paying for every program, it should be up the states on anything other than a certain couple of programs.
I might be more convinced by that argument, except California is currently doing its best to prove to the world that state legislatures are even more incompetent at coming up with a rational budget than the federal government. The lesson I'm getting here is that the same types of people get elected to the state and federal levels of government, but at the federal level there's some scrutiny and accountability as opposed to the state level.
I'm not making any statement as to what SHOULD be the case, and I too am guilty of not paying attention to local politics.
Strictly speaking, that offers some insight into troll psychology. Or someone accidentally hit insightful when they meant to pick troll. Alt accounts are also a possibility.
Er... sorry, little bit of misreading there. On second look, you weren't talking about voluntary taxes, you were talking about flat tax. Well I'll just go cry in a corner now...
We're already in a spending deficit and people think that taxes are too high. If it were all voluntary, we aren't talking about the military having to cut back, we're talking about the military being unable to muster enough strength to defend ourselves against CUBA. And then suddenly taxes are once again not voluntary.
Control people? That's a ridiculous way of putting it. Oops, sorry, didn't see your tinfoil hat.
I'm an atheist - I have no religious beliefs, you ignorant clod!:-)
I guess that should have actually been "...implying that an individual's religious beliefs and position on abortion is based on inteligence, which is based on genetics..."
...how you can justify people having kids that are going to have a grossly shortened, painful, and ultimately tragic life.
By not having the arrogance to assume I know what's best. That also happens to be why I'm pro-choice.
Same as euthenasia - I'm all for it.
You're really getting off topic here...
...every fetus that should have been aborted that wasn't potentially takes the place of one who could have been viable.
You're going to have to explain that one. Be sure to explain why that matters in a discussion of medical insurance as well.
Just keep telling yourselves that God really wants you to breed kids that will live a shortened, painful, and meainingless life. Stupidity, like intelligence, is partly genetic.
You have by far surpassed many fundamentalists and pro-lifers in terms of stupid statements by implying that your religious beliefs and position on abortion is based on inteligence, which is based on genetics. You also just proved they're not the only ones with a tendancy to oversimplify things to black and white.
Nothing like cutting edge 21st century technology to bring the US roaring into step with 20th century social attitudes. Way to keep up guys.
It's funny, you say that like we all got together and foolishly decided that private health insurance was the best way to go, rather than special interests setting up camp directly opposed to what is better for everyone else.
Since we're going to play that game, good job on setting up the government corruption in (insert your home country here).
Insurance, after all, is about mitigating risk, and a fuller knowledge of one's exposure to risk is a good thing.
MEDICAL insurance is, to most people, actually all about being able to afford medical treatment. Knowing your "risk" in this situation unfortunately can often only lead to you being denied coverage and subsequently NOT afford the services you need more.
Well, I think "important" is a personal call, I'd be much more interested in news about a cure for arthritis than MS if I had arthritis but not MS
Moreover it's not always about which disease is a higher priority. From the blurby article, it does seem odd that they'd mention that instead of MS, but there could be a technical explanation that could have been judged not worth putting into the article. I have no specific knowledge of either, but it wouldn't suprise me if it looked like this happened to be a good cure fure rheumatoid arthritis but not MS. If the scientists involved had a reason to think RA was going to be going down soon because of this, but for whatever reason this wouldn't work for MS, it would make sense to give RA as an example with no mention of MS.
do have one worry, though: Stem cells, some research is starting to indicate, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow new tissue to grow, but on the other, that new growth may end up being cancerous. One wonders whether the fact that we don't naturally produce stem cells at this rate reflects the optimal balance that evolution has found.
That's great insight, assuming you didn't read it in an article. That's very close to the actual explanation the field has come up with. Adult stem cells generally divide comparatively slowly, the thinking is that each time a cell divides, there's an increased frequency of errors, and increased chances for it to turn cancerous in other words. Stem cells have the ability to renew themselves, that translates into they are missing a major check against cancer right off the bat. The thinking is that by having them divide slow, that limits their potential to turn cancerous.
In many settings, stem cells give rise directly to transient amplifying cells, which divide much faster but are limited in their reproductive potential. They divde fast, and so have more chances to turn cancerous, but their ability to endlessly self-renew is turned off, at some point they will extinguish and turn into differentiated, non-dividing cells. In that way, the body may minimize the chances of cancer.
So yes, this treatment would probably increase your chances of getting cancer, and that's something that's going to have to be rigorously tested and hopefully minimized, but it would presumably be used in very limited applications.
Interestingly, many cancer drugs themselves merely increase the rate of errors during division. Cancer cells kind of remind me of Reaver ships from Firefly, they're dangerous, but they're comaratively unstable. Those chemotherapy drugs, and radiation therapy affect cancerous cells more because their genomes are highly unstable, and genetic damage is more lethal to them, but it does also increase the chances of healthy cells going cancerous.
There never is a magic bullet when it comes to medicine, and nearly everything causes cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
Both treatments kill *all* cells. The idea is to kill the cancer cells *first*, before the treatment kills the patient.
Not quite. The current generation of drugs do have a tendancy to affect any DIVIDING cells in the body, but not all of them. Big difference, your mature brain cells and your heart muscles should not directly be targeted. The fastest dividing cells in the body will generally be affected the most, that's cancer cell. It also helps that they're less stable than healthy cells and succumb to genomic damage faster. The lining of your gut, your fingernails, hair, and skin are also fast-dividing, they also will be affected, but I believe they divide slower than most cancers, and they are more resillient than cancer cells. There's also a numbers game though, cancer can be beaten back to one cell and still recover, you need most of your stomach lining intact. So you're right in that you should kill the cancer cells before you kill the patient, but it would take an extremely high dose of any chemotherapy to start killing EVERY cell in your body, and you as an organism would be dead at much lower doses.
Given how the effects would look like an auto-immune disorder, this gives totalitarian elements in "democracies" (do they actually represent ANY of us anymore?) the way to untraceably dispose of political opponents.
Crazy conspiracy theories based on undeveloped technology aside, soldiers on battlefields are not political opponents (at least not for several years). As far as applications to real intrigues, remember almost anything will give you cancer, some substances are far more potent at that than smoking. If you really wanted to take out a political opponent and wanted to make it look natural, there are far more effective and easy ways to do it. In fact, I'd bet good money that there are more effective ways to make it look like an autoimmune disease if for some reason it absolutely had to be that.
I'll wait for the results to say 100% that this would have no evil applications like what you're saying, but I will say I'm 99% sure that there are easier ways to accomplish those goals using other technology.
The human immune system is a pretty potent beast to unleash. Getting it to attack cancer cells is genius. I would be worried about side effects, specifically the immune system getting confused or over-stimulated and attacking other things, but that's just speculation and surely for highly aggressive cancers like the ones they tested in the mice the risk would be more than worth it. We already use 'cures as bad as the disease' to treat cancer.
Lets wait for the clinical trials first. If you develop minor allergies, that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make in order to get rid of a life-threatening inoperable tumor.
The bigger issue will probably be that this will kill most of the cells of the tumor, but there will be a resistant fraction of cancer cells left that will repopulate, which you could feasibly seed again I guess...
Incorporate this in bullets and you get 100% lethality.
Well in terms of pure combat standards, an injured soldier is actually worse than a dead one, since the dead one can be carried off later, wheras the injured one needs immediate medical attention.
Your body releases cytokines every time you get cut, or shot. Your immune system manages to avoid killing you in those cases, usually.
Why bother with this roundabout way anyhow? If you absolutely want to kill everyone you shoot, it would be much easier and quicker to make a poisoned bullet.
Psst, they weren't using viruses or anything contagious. Hard to see how small plastic inserts and protein could spread from person to person. Even if it did, it would cause an autoimmune disease, not reprogram you to be a vampire/zombie. And there are worse apocalypse scenarios than Will Smith hitting on mannequins.
However after RTA I did see that all of the control group died and the mice with the implant 90% were cured.
I hate to say it, but that's over-interpreting. This appears to have warded off imminent death in the mice, which is a result that is very encouraging. Unfortunately, it likely did not -cure- the mice. When we see data indicating these mice have a 5-year survival which is greater than the control (uh... or whatever the equivalent is since even healthy mice maybe don't live 5 years) then I too will be celebrating.
The immune system would sort of be vaccinated against markers on the cancer cells, but there's no guarantee that every cancer cell will have the marker and will keep it. You can imagine that if 99% of the cells in a tumor do have it, the tumor may be killed by the primed cells, but that 1% that doesn't will repopulate a while later.
Of course, this may have a feedback effect. I'm no immunologist, but I would hazard a guess that if a tumor were being attacked in this manner, the increased activity in the area may start targeting that 1% too. Maybe. That could also be a downside, as you can imagine if the immune system is primed but learns the wrong marker, you suddenly have an autoimmune disease on top of the cancer. Once again, I'm not an immunologist, so I don't know whether that's pure crap or not.
So it's another good finding, and of course a way to fight tumors is a miracle to a patient even if it's not a complete cure. It might be a total cure, but let's not set ourselves up for dissapointment.
1. Posing as someone else, post false news that own lab has made a breakthrough discovery
2. Take down the faked article before any scrutiny can be applied and it is determined to be a fake
3. ???
4. Profit!
You're sure that's enough to fix it? I suspect the real problem and the only solution has to do with spending on law enforcement. No one ever got voted out of state office for beefing up law enforcement. I have not looked at the budget, so don't use that prediction for anything, but I'd be suprised if cutting back on federal funding would solve the problem even if that was an option.
We're a federalist republic, the federal government SHOULDN'T be paying for every program, it should be up the states on anything other than a certain couple of programs.
I might be more convinced by that argument, except California is currently doing its best to prove to the world that state legislatures are even more incompetent at coming up with a rational budget than the federal government. The lesson I'm getting here is that the same types of people get elected to the state and federal levels of government, but at the federal level there's some scrutiny and accountability as opposed to the state level.
I'm not making any statement as to what SHOULD be the case, and I too am guilty of not paying attention to local politics.
Strictly speaking, that offers some insight into troll psychology. Or someone accidentally hit insightful when they meant to pick troll. Alt accounts are also a possibility.
Er... sorry, little bit of misreading there. On second look, you weren't talking about voluntary taxes, you were talking about flat tax. Well I'll just go cry in a corner now...
Which one do you think the US government prefers?
The one that works.
We're already in a spending deficit and people think that taxes are too high. If it were all voluntary, we aren't talking about the military having to cut back, we're talking about the military being unable to muster enough strength to defend ourselves against CUBA. And then suddenly taxes are once again not voluntary.
Control people? That's a ridiculous way of putting it. Oops, sorry, didn't see your tinfoil hat.
No, the economy has just gotten THAT bad.
Yes, a whole 9 days before their time.
Here's one I made up a while ago:
Fluoride says to oxygen "You're always so negative."
Oxygen says: "How ionic that you would say that."
As an added bonus, you can automatically play the "Mess with Grandpa's pacemaker" game.
(Note, if you are going to start blabbing about how the field isn't strong enough or something like that: preemptivewoosh)
In soviet russia, where object is heading IS where object is.
There was a reason I made a far, far worse joke, but the shock of the monstrosity I had created made me forget it...
I'm an atheist - I have no religious beliefs, you ignorant clod! :-)
I guess that should have actually been "...implying that an individual's religious beliefs and position on abortion is based on inteligence, which is based on genetics..."
...how you can justify people having kids that are going to have a grossly shortened, painful, and ultimately tragic life.
By not having the arrogance to assume I know what's best. That also happens to be why I'm pro-choice.
Same as euthenasia - I'm all for it.
You're really getting off topic here...
...every fetus that should have been aborted that wasn't potentially takes the place of one who could have been viable.
You're going to have to explain that one. Be sure to explain why that matters in a discussion of medical insurance as well.
Just keep telling yourselves that God really wants you to breed kids that will live a shortened, painful, and meainingless life. Stupidity, like intelligence, is partly genetic.
You have by far surpassed many fundamentalists and pro-lifers in terms of stupid statements by implying that your religious beliefs and position on abortion is based on inteligence, which is based on genetics. You also just proved they're not the only ones with a tendancy to oversimplify things to black and white.
Woosh. Every country does, and it's not that the citizens choose it, just as we in the US didn't decide to go with for-profit health insurance.
Why on earth should society deliberately hobble itself supporting people with severe hereditary disease?
Because this is Earth, and that's what civilized people on Earth do.
Never mind the fact that people with these diseases who have children are exceptionally (and unacceptably) selfish.
Judging from your comic-book villain logic, you're no model of human evolution yourself.
Nothing like cutting edge 21st century technology to bring the US roaring into step with 20th century social attitudes. Way to keep up guys.
It's funny, you say that like we all got together and foolishly decided that private health insurance was the best way to go, rather than special interests setting up camp directly opposed to what is better for everyone else.
Since we're going to play that game, good job on setting up the government corruption in (insert your home country here).
Insurance, after all, is about mitigating risk, and a fuller knowledge of one's exposure to risk is a good thing.
MEDICAL insurance is, to most people, actually all about being able to afford medical treatment. Knowing your "risk" in this situation unfortunately can often only lead to you being denied coverage and subsequently NOT afford the services you need more.
Well, I think "important" is a personal call, I'd be much more interested in news about a cure for arthritis than MS if I had arthritis but not MS
Moreover it's not always about which disease is a higher priority. From the blurby article, it does seem odd that they'd mention that instead of MS, but there could be a technical explanation that could have been judged not worth putting into the article. I have no specific knowledge of either, but it wouldn't suprise me if it looked like this happened to be a good cure fure rheumatoid arthritis but not MS. If the scientists involved had a reason to think RA was going to be going down soon because of this, but for whatever reason this wouldn't work for MS, it would make sense to give RA as an example with no mention of MS.
do have one worry, though: Stem cells, some research is starting to indicate, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow new tissue to grow, but on the other, that new growth may end up being cancerous. One wonders whether the fact that we don't naturally produce stem cells at this rate reflects the optimal balance that evolution has found.
That's great insight, assuming you didn't read it in an article. That's very close to the actual explanation the field has come up with. Adult stem cells generally divide comparatively slowly, the thinking is that each time a cell divides, there's an increased frequency of errors, and increased chances for it to turn cancerous in other words. Stem cells have the ability to renew themselves, that translates into they are missing a major check against cancer right off the bat. The thinking is that by having them divide slow, that limits their potential to turn cancerous.
In many settings, stem cells give rise directly to transient amplifying cells, which divide much faster but are limited in their reproductive potential. They divde fast, and so have more chances to turn cancerous, but their ability to endlessly self-renew is turned off, at some point they will extinguish and turn into differentiated, non-dividing cells. In that way, the body may minimize the chances of cancer.
So yes, this treatment would probably increase your chances of getting cancer, and that's something that's going to have to be rigorously tested and hopefully minimized, but it would presumably be used in very limited applications.
Interestingly, many cancer drugs themselves merely increase the rate of errors during division. Cancer cells kind of remind me of Reaver ships from Firefly, they're dangerous, but they're comaratively unstable. Those chemotherapy drugs, and radiation therapy affect cancerous cells more because their genomes are highly unstable, and genetic damage is more lethal to them, but it does also increase the chances of healthy cells going cancerous.
There never is a magic bullet when it comes to medicine, and nearly everything causes cancer.