3 ms·

While I am glad the author has liberated himself from the emotional distress of cancer through blind optimism, he has shown himself to be a blithering ignoramus

While I am glad the author has liberated himself from the emotional distress of cancer through blind optimism, he has shown himself to be a blithering ignoramus in matters oncological. I certainly hope that his prognostications for 2030 carry a hint of truth, but they seem to suggest that one type of neoplasm in a single body of tissue is like another - e.g. all brain tumours are magically alike, treatable by the same means! Nothing could be further from the truth. It is difficult to suppose that the treatment of such a thing is going to be a mere outpatient clinical procedure with a high success rate and few side effects. It is precisely because cancers are a broad category of runaway cellular processes (united only by their invasiveness and lack of negative feedback into the growth process) that are highly distinct in every which way that the concept of a "cure" for "cancer" as such is an absurd one to anyone who has the slightest clue about how cancers operate. It does seem that targeted therapy is the most successful avenue to pursue, but I don't think the author has any idea of the sheer amount of even the most common and relatively simple "targets." I think he's imagining that there are a dozen, maybe two; liver cancer is cured one way, brain cancer another way, retinal blastomas another way, prostate cancer yet another way... that's just not how it works. Each one of those corpuses of tissue can develop many kinds of tumours, and some of them can develop practically innumerable kinds. But hey, far it be from me to rain on anybody's parade - I'm not an oncologist, and have no life sciences background. Let's hope I'm wrong viz. my opening sentence and that I'm just a pretentious, know-it-all twit, and that he's right.

reasonattlm 17y ago
No suggestion was made that all forms of cancer are the same. But to the best of my knowledge, all cancers have distinctive cancer cell surface chemistry - which may vary somewhat between individual genotypes, but is generally similar for clades of cancers between individuals. In the targeted paradigm, cancer research is a matter of identifying that chemistry, and then programming your hunter-killers to that scent. These two jobs - (a) take an individual's cancer biopsy and identify its signature, or match it to an established library of signatures and (b) construct a homing mechanism for that signature - are core competencies for today's cutting edge biotechnology. There are many, many examples from the past few years of researchers doing exactly what you scoff at in the laboratory, for specific cancers in laboratory animals. In summary: one technology platform, many different implementations, a large library of cancer signatures built from the results of individual therapies.

reasonattlm 17y ago

No suggestion was made that all forms of cancer are the same. But to the best of my knowledge, all cancers have distinctive cancer cell surface chemistry - which may vary somewhat between individual genotypes, but is generally similar for clades of cancers between individuals. In the targeted paradigm, cancer research is a matter of identifying that chemistry, and then programming your hunter-killers to that scent. These two jobs - (a) take an individual's cancer biopsy and identify its signature, or match it to an established library of signatures and (b) construct a homing mechanism for that signature - are core competencies for today's cutting edge biotechnology. There are many, many examples from the past few years of researchers doing exactly what you scoff at in the laboratory, for specific cancers in laboratory animals. In summary: one technology platform, many different implementations, a large library of cancer signatures built from the results of individual therapies.