3 ms·

Cancer is just a name to group a lot of different diseases under; there can't be an universal cure...

by NKCSS 10y ago

rubber_duck 10y ago
If you had a general purpose way to selectively kill specific cell types then there could theoretically be a universal cure ?
- dekhn 10y ago
  No, because cancer always evolves. If you don't kill 100% of cancer cells, the remaining cells are likely resistant to whatever you used to kill the specific cell type, and they will grow up and continue causing problems. What you would need is something that recognized cancer cells and only cancer cells with 100% specificity/100% selectivity, and killed all of them. This is near impossible for something that can evolve.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    It's an arms race, but we can in principle stay mostly ahead in it. Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values. We know how the optimization process works here, what we lack today is enough control over the problem space to screw that process up.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      Arms races are a great way to bankrupt yourself. as for "Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values", that's a nice speculation, however, it's just a speculation, and not one well-founded in fact.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        It's a one race we can't avoid - biology will not cooperate to stop evolving pathogens if we collectively agree to abandon medical research. As for the speculation part, it kind of follows from the math of things. Evolution is very dumb compared to us, it just has the numbers advantage.
        dekhn 10y ago
        I heartily encourage you to look at the current state of antibiotics and appreciate that while evolution may not be "smart", it has more advantages that just numbers. As for cancer, it's not clear that more effective cancer will evolve in the near term if we don't apply selection pressure to it- cancer has existed in humans with little to no change for millions of years and in mammals for far longer than that.

Cancer is just a name to group a lot of different diseases under; there can't be an universal cure...

by NKCSS 10y ago

Cancer is just a name to group a lot of different diseases under; there can't be an universal cure...

If you had a general purpose way to selectively kill specific cell types then there could theoretically be a universal cure ?

dekhn 10y ago
No, because cancer always evolves. If you don't kill 100% of cancer cells, the remaining cells are likely resistant to whatever you used to kill the specific cell type, and they will grow up and continue causing problems. What you would need is something that recognized cancer cells and only cancer cells with 100% specificity/100% selectivity, and killed all of them. This is near impossible for something that can evolve.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's an arms race, but we can in principle stay mostly ahead in it. Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values. We know how the optimization process works here, what we lack today is enough control over the problem space to screw that process up.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    Arms races are a great way to bankrupt yourself. as for "Evolution is not a perfect solution finder, and in the future, we may be able to constrain it by reducing the probability of a mutation we can't handle to arbitrarily low values", that's a nice speculation, however, it's just a speculation, and not one well-founded in fact.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's a one race we can't avoid - biology will not cooperate to stop evolving pathogens if we collectively agree to abandon medical research. As for the speculation part, it kind of follows from the math of things. Evolution is very dumb compared to us, it just has the numbers advantage.
      - dekhn 10y ago
        I heartily encourage you to look at the current state of antibiotics and appreciate that while evolution may not be "smart", it has more advantages that just numbers. As for cancer, it's not clear that more effective cancer will evolve in the near term if we don't apply selection pressure to it- cancer has existed in humans with little to no change for millions of years and in mammals for far longer than that.