10 ms·

I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incred

I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we have a cure for trisomy 21? For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction? These things are far more complicated than just creating the right drug. But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.

user731955373 10y ago
"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.
- kendallpark 10y ago
  Which is a remarkable scientific achievement, independent of its use.
  - goatlover 10y ago
    Remarkable in the same way a future gray goo invention would be. And it was a military initiative, developed for military reasons.
    - EGreg 10y ago
      So was the internet. You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
      - czep 10y ago
        And from whose rocket are you going to trust launching those nukes? I'm not interested in even being in the same Hemisphere as such a launch! And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
- nixos 10y ago
  Which is _much_ (orders of magnitude) easier than curing Cancer
  - iaw 10y ago
    Arguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
    - zbyte64 10y ago
      Just from a data volume perspective cancer and atomic bombs are magnitudes apart. Throw in the fact that cancer evolves and understanding those mutations requires unraveling millions of years of evolution and you've got a doozy.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - iaw 10y ago
        I strongly believe that our analytic capabilities (as a species) have grown by orders of magnitude since we built the bomb. My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
        1_2__3 10y ago
        Reading your comments it really seems like smart and knowledgeable people are trying to make substantive arguments replies and you're answering with woo-woo. You should probably listen more. I've learned a lot from reading them.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      The difference between "yes we can!" re: the atomic bomb and Zuckerberg's post is that the former happened after the fundamental discoveries in physics that made the atomic bomb possible. By the time someone said "yes we can!" a theoretical analysis of how the bomb would work already existed. That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
- johansch 10y ago
  Mark ("and Priscilla") are pledging $3B. The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    "They are short $23B." That's where this part comes in: "The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"
    - johansch 10y ago
      They (Government-sponsored scientists) were already working on all of these things.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    That a quarter bill.
- prewett 10y ago
  "Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based. Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.
    - prewett 10y ago
      True, and a good point to make. My understanding of the difficulty of the atomic bomb was that everyone knew what to do (smash enriched uranium together such that was more than a certain mass), but they had a lot of difficulty getting the spherical detonation right. So the problem wasn't unknown from the physics side, but was rather an engineering problem. Compare to "cure all diseases," which we don't even know how to do theoretically.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  How did we miss this universal cure sitting right under our nose!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Do you have a E=MC2 sort of revelation in regards to cancer?
- bsder 10y ago
  Only by turning almost 10% OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb. That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars. So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
  - rory096 10y ago
    Source? Estimates I see for the Manhattan Project from a quick google range from .25% to .41% of GDP. [0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf [1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-project-take-number.html http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf
    - akiselev 10y ago
      He's likely thinking of the urban myth that over 10% of the US's power generation was used for the Manhattan Project [1] and confusing it with the cost of the project, for which estimates vary but is around $2 billion total (1945 GDP was $2 trillion). [1] http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4 http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4
    - bsder 10y ago
      I'm also referring to the fact that estimates put in that almost 1 in 11 people in the US were involved in some facet of atomic bomb development. The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    > That's not 2 billion dollars The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
- onion2k 10y ago
  "Yes we can!" built everything, whether it's good or bad, large or small.
- smsm42 10y ago
  Blowing stuff up is usually easier than fixing stuff. Do we have cold fusion yet (not Macromedia :)? Do we have fusion reactors yet? In fact, we seem to be slowly losing ability to have any use of nuclear energy except blowing stuff up - it's next to impossible to get a new nuclear plant built, and old ones are being closed down. By the same 2100 we may have the atomic bomb as the only way to use nuclear energy we have. And still no fusion.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I think he might be an HN user... http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png
joe_the_user 10y ago
One would roll one's eyes if someone promised to fix every single bug in a vast, buggy, fifty-year old software project. But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.
- gmarx 10y ago
  That's doesn't even account for the probably larger number of bugs that develop over the lifetime of the system. Then, once a cancer develops it evolves further mutations over time. You probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth
  - fnl 10y ago
    Epigenetics is the word you're looking for here. And probably some healthy dose of metabolomics. Cancer is way more complex than "just" changes in the genetic code.
    - gmarx 10y ago
      I don't think so. I'm sure there are epigenetic effects in cancer but I'm also pretty sure that cancers develop new mutations as they proceed. Ones that fool the immune system or chemotherapy agents get selected for and drive the cancer forward
- projektir 10y ago
  You can fix all the bugs in the fifty-year old software project... by writing a new version of it. Sometimes the right solution doesn't deal with existing problems but tries to go somewhere else entirely.
  - supercoder 10y ago
    So you're suggesting they're going to just give birth to a super race of people ?
BurningFrog 10y ago
I think the current medical research system is badly broken in several ways, and it's possible that a few billions spent on alternative approaches would bear a lot of fruit. It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
- euyyn 10y ago
  What approaches do you mean? In which ways do you think it's broken?
  - nicklaf 10y ago
    http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter. This general topic sometimes comes up on HN (most recently, yesterday†). Here's a good starting point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2Fcomics%2Farchive.php%3Fcomicid%3D1431&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2... † https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535880
    - andrewprock 10y ago
      Do you have anything from a more reliable source?
      - nicklaf 10y ago
        I included a reliable source! Click my link to yesterday's HN story. It is an interview with John P.A. Ioannidis, "who is a professor at Stanford University and one of the most highly cited researchers in the world".
fredgrott 10y ago
cancers are not broad, yes the areas of the human body they affect..yes that is broad.. Mark was reacting to this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/
angersock 10y ago
So, I think the interesting question is--take them at their word, and what do we then do with the resulting population explosion? It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.
- projektir 10y ago
  Given low birth rates in developed countries I'm not sure that the population explosion would sustain itself if the area was properly governed.
dhbradshaw 10y ago
Here's my best prediction for how it's could happen: when the all human immune systems are able to learn from each other, we'll be most of the way there. The immune system is at the center of most human diseases. Cancer? It's the best solution. Infection? Best solution. Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease. Right now, if you want your body to be immune to something, you're immune system has to learn that particular immunity. If we can form an artificial immune system "culture" then it seems like learning could be much, much faster.
- jonny_eh 10y ago
  > Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease Zuckerberg should give you all his money.
- nextos 10y ago
  It is. That's why immunotherapies have gone from a fringe area to something super hot attracting tons of funding. But first, we need to understand the cell. For this we believe we need not only statistical learning, but also formal methods. See e.g. a slightly dated but brilliant paper from Luca Cardelli: http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20Systems%20Biology%20(Draft).pdf http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20S...
- tominous 10y ago
  I'm struggling to see how that can be done without in vivo genetic engineering (to ensure immune compatibility), constant blood surveillance of the population (to detect pathogens), chemical infusions deployed en masse like a firmware update, and giant cube-shaped space ships.
  - pazimzadeh 10y ago
    How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.
bbcbasic 10y ago
Reminds me of this episode of The Outer Limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Breed_(The_Outer_Limits) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Breed_(The_Outer_Limit... TLDR: "Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots" ... "The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."
toufka 10y ago
Without disagreeing with your point, there are actually currently gene therapies to cure trisomy 21 [1] (a clever trick of affixing the signal that is used to silence a (female's)/the (male's) X chromosome to the 3rd of the 21st chromosomes). I don't think it's all the way through FDA approval, and is still very much experimental, but is exactly the kind of thing that is curable. And that is where your point stands: it is hard to know which unknowns are easy unknowns, and which unknowns are nearly impossible unknowns because both are currently of the same quality - unknown. The grandiose claim is fancy, and much will be accomplished in 80 years, but even ill-defined language of 'disease' and 'cure' belies our ignorance. [1] http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome-silenced/303003 http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome...
nkozyra 10y ago
The skepticism is totally warranted, but you have to really consider the strides made in just 100 years. There's practically a Moore's Law of medicine happening. We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.
segmondy 10y ago
People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time. Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.
- DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  It seems to me like the biggest things are impossible to see with a "normal" outlook. It's as if you either can't see the big thing, or you see it in a fantasy world, a fiction of some kind (science or otherwise). Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version connecting a handful of places and think, "Wow, this could connect EVERYONE!" They didn't stand there, looking at the terminals of two connected computers, and imagine a connected world like the one we live in today. They didn't talk about ecommerce and social media global events being reported on in near real time. No one had to roll their eyes, because no one was making these grand claims. I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there. When you look at all the big tech moments in (recent-ish) history, the car, modern computation, the PC, aviation, you don't see people coming out with these grand declarations before the fact. And it's not for lack of intelligent, visionary people. So it makes me wonder, whenever a person makes such grandiose plans, and they're not fiction writers, what's so different about them that they'd be able to see so far ahead? Maybe they're different. How would I know? But history makes me skeptical.
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
wyager 10y ago
General-purpose nanorobotics would pretty much allow us to do arbitrary medical procedures with cell-level accuracy. Cancer would be easy. Modifying brain structure would be easy. Pretty much everything would be easy.
- srunni 10y ago
  See chapter 3 ("Nanotechnology will not lead to super-abundance") of Against Transhumanism for a good argument for why this isn't so simple: http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Against_Transhumanism_1.0.pdf http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201... Summary 1. Lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness of molecules (Van der Waals force), constant random interactions (Brownian motion) at the microscale of cells means mechanistic intuitions from the macroscale don't apply. 2. High surface area (combined with VdW force) causes problems related to friction and energy dissipation.
  - wyager 10y ago
    I didn't want to navigate that PDF, so I read the author's IEEE article, which I think has similar content. What a boring criticism! All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. His conclusion seems to be "mechanical engineering as with gears and pulleys won't work with nanobots". Duh! No one claimed otherwise. > mechanistic intuitions about the microscale don't apply. Obviously. Why would you or the author think nanotechnology optimists don't know this? Half the reason we don't have nanobots is because we don't yet have the engineering expertise and practical tools for these scales. The other half is that we're still working out efficient 3D nanofabrication. They are related problems. These are not physically insurmountable issues (as demonstrated thoroughly by organic life). There are a hundred different fields of study that are slowly eating away at the edges of the general purpose nanofabrication problem.
    - srunni 10y ago
      > All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. If they are so "easily approachable," feel free to solve them any time. I think you'll find that solving problems in living systems (let alone in the clinic) is much more challenging than it might appear from a CS/physics perspective (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1). I'm not saying it's not worth trying (it's certainly a more worthwhile endeavor than getting people to click on more ads), but that it's important to be realistic (for example, that all disease is unlikely to be cured by 2100).
fsloth 10y ago
" For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction?" If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).
MasterScrat 10y ago
> when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer": http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.php?comicid=1162 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...
sriku 10y ago
I, for one, am imagining a news item 84 years into the future - "how letting people share lunch pictures and stalk other people has led to the eradication of all diseases". The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.
nathan_f77 10y ago
I'm the opposite, I always roll my eyes when doctors say that AI/ML will never replace human doctors, or at least that it can never replace their human intuition or empathy. Human intuition is exactly what will be superseded by machine learning. I know empathy is important, and I read something about lonely people being less likely to have a fast recovery, but it just isn't all that important for accurate diagnoses or treatment. Further reading from Vinod Khosla: http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-what-doctors-do/ http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-...
nso95 10y ago
It's better to be optimistic and try than pessimistic and do nothing

user731955373 10y ago

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

kendallpark 10y ago
Which is a remarkable scientific achievement, independent of its use.
- goatlover 10y ago
  Remarkable in the same way a future gray goo invention would be. And it was a military initiative, developed for military reasons.
  - EGreg 10y ago
    So was the internet. You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
    - czep 10y ago
      And from whose rocket are you going to trust launching those nukes? I'm not interested in even being in the same Hemisphere as such a launch! And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
nixos 10y ago
Which is _much_ (orders of magnitude) easier than curing Cancer
- iaw 10y ago
  Arguable. We can only compare difficulty after the fact, if Einstein hadn't rolled along with relativity and 3 decade gap for research, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible. There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
  - zbyte64 10y ago
    Just from a data volume perspective cancer and atomic bombs are magnitudes apart. Throw in the fact that cancer evolves and understanding those mutations requires unraveling millions of years of evolution and you've got a doozy.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - iaw 10y ago
      I strongly believe that our analytic capabilities (as a species) have grown by orders of magnitude since we built the bomb. My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
      - 1_2__3 10y ago
        Reading your comments it really seems like smart and knowledgeable people are trying to make substantive arguments replies and you're answering with woo-woo. You should probably listen more. I've learned a lot from reading them.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    The difference between "yes we can!" re: the atomic bomb and Zuckerberg's post is that the former happened after the fundamental discoveries in physics that made the atomic bomb possible. By the time someone said "yes we can!" a theoretical analysis of how the bomb would work already existed. That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
johansch 10y ago
Mark ("and Priscilla") are pledging $3B. The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "They are short $23B." That's where this part comes in: "The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"
  - johansch 10y ago
    They (Government-sponsored scientists) were already working on all of these things.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  That a quarter bill.
prewett 10y ago
"Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based. Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I agree with you, but I'd like to point out that it's easy to say "x is very specific" if you know exactly what x is after-the-fact.
  - prewett 10y ago
    True, and a good point to make. My understanding of the difficulty of the atomic bomb was that everyone knew what to do (smash enriched uranium together such that was more than a certain mass), but they had a lot of difficulty getting the spherical detonation right. So the problem wasn't unknown from the physics side, but was rather an engineering problem. Compare to "cure all diseases," which we don't even know how to do theoretically.
johncolanduoni 10y ago
How did we miss this universal cure sitting right under our nose!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cmdrfred 10y ago
Do you have a E=MC2 sort of revelation in regards to cancer?
bsder 10y ago
Only by turning almost 10% OF AN ENTIRE COUNTRY into doing nothing but producing an atomic bomb. That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars. So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
- rory096 10y ago
  Source? Estimates I see for the Manhattan Project from a quick google range from .25% to .41% of GDP. [0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf [1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-project-take-number.html http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.09054.pdf
  - akiselev 10y ago
    He's likely thinking of the urban myth that over 10% of the US's power generation was used for the Manhattan Project [1] and confusing it with the cost of the project, for which estimates vary but is around $2 billion total (1945 GDP was $2 trillion). [1] http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4 http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Session/H13.4
  - bsder 10y ago
    I'm also referring to the fact that estimates put in that almost 1 in 11 people in the US were involved in some facet of atomic bomb development. The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > That's not 2 billion dollars The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
onion2k 10y ago
"Yes we can!" built everything, whether it's good or bad, large or small.
smsm42 10y ago
Blowing stuff up is usually easier than fixing stuff. Do we have cold fusion yet (not Macromedia :)? Do we have fusion reactors yet? In fact, we seem to be slowly losing ability to have any use of nuclear energy except blowing stuff up - it's next to impossible to get a new nuclear plant built, and old ones are being closed down. By the same 2100 we may have the atomic bomb as the only way to use nuclear energy we have. And still no fusion.
M_Grey 10y ago
I think he might be an HN user... http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/manhattan_project.png

joe_the_user 10y ago

One would roll one's eyes if someone promised to fix every single bug in a vast, buggy, fifty-year old software project. But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.

gmarx 10y ago
That's doesn't even account for the probably larger number of bugs that develop over the lifetime of the system. Then, once a cancer develops it evolves further mutations over time. You probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth
- fnl 10y ago
  Epigenetics is the word you're looking for here. And probably some healthy dose of metabolomics. Cancer is way more complex than "just" changes in the genetic code.
  - gmarx 10y ago
    I don't think so. I'm sure there are epigenetic effects in cancer but I'm also pretty sure that cancers develop new mutations as they proceed. Ones that fool the immune system or chemotherapy agents get selected for and drive the cancer forward
projektir 10y ago
You can fix all the bugs in the fifty-year old software project... by writing a new version of it. Sometimes the right solution doesn't deal with existing problems but tries to go somewhere else entirely.
- supercoder 10y ago
  So you're suggesting they're going to just give birth to a super race of people ?

BurningFrog 10y ago

I think the current medical research system is badly broken in several ways, and it's possible that a few billions spent on alternative approaches would bear a lot of fruit. It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.

euyyn 10y ago
What approaches do you mean? In which ways do you think it's broken?
- nicklaf 10y ago
  http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter. This general topic sometimes comes up on HN (most recently, yesterday†). Here's a good starting point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2Fcomics%2Farchive.php%3Fcomicid%3D1431&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2... † https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535880
  - andrewprock 10y ago
    Do you have anything from a more reliable source?
    - nicklaf 10y ago
      I included a reliable source! Click my link to yesterday's HN story. It is an interview with John P.A. Ioannidis, "who is a professor at Stanford University and one of the most highly cited researchers in the world".

fredgrott 10y ago

cancers are not broad, yes the areas of the human body they affect..yes that is broad.. Mark was reacting to this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/

angersock 10y ago

So, I think the interesting question is--take them at their word, and what do we then do with the resulting population explosion? It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.

projektir 10y ago
Given low birth rates in developed countries I'm not sure that the population explosion would sustain itself if the area was properly governed.

dhbradshaw 10y ago

Here's my best prediction for how it's could happen: when the all human immune systems are able to learn from each other, we'll be most of the way there. The immune system is at the center of most human diseases. Cancer? It's the best solution. Infection? Best solution. Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease. Right now, if you want your body to be immune to something, you're immune system has to learn that particular immunity. If we can form an artificial immune system "culture" then it seems like learning could be much, much faster.

jonny_eh 10y ago
> Autoimmune disease?Fixing the immune system would be the best solution to autoimmune disease Zuckerberg should give you all his money.
nextos 10y ago
It is. That's why immunotherapies have gone from a fringe area to something super hot attracting tons of funding. But first, we need to understand the cell. For this we believe we need not only statistical learning, but also formal methods. See e.g. a slightly dated but brilliant paper from Luca Cardelli: http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20Systems%20Biology%20(Draft).pdf http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20S...
tominous 10y ago
I'm struggling to see how that can be done without in vivo genetic engineering (to ensure immune compatibility), constant blood surveillance of the population (to detect pathogens), chemical infusions deployed en masse like a firmware update, and giant cube-shaped space ships.
- pazimzadeh 10y ago
  How about using commensal bacteria to design an "external immune system" which can respond to any pathogen we program it too. Bacteria coat basically all cavities in your body and could scan incoming threats and respond to them before the human immune system is every involved.

bbcbasic 10y ago

Reminds me of this episode of The Outer Limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Breed_(The_Outer_Limits) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Breed_(The_Outer_Limit... TLDR: "Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots" ... "The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."

toufka 10y ago

Without disagreeing with your point, there are actually currently gene therapies to cure trisomy 21 [1] (a clever trick of affixing the signal that is used to silence a (female's)/the (male's) X chromosome to the 3rd of the 21st chromosomes). I don't think it's all the way through FDA approval, and is still very much experimental, but is exactly the kind of thing that is curable. And that is where your point stands: it is hard to know which unknowns are easy unknowns, and which unknowns are nearly impossible unknowns because both are currently of the same quality - unknown. The grandiose claim is fancy, and much will be accomplished in 80 years, but even ill-defined language of 'disease' and 'cure' belies our ignorance. [1] http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome-silenced/303003 http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome...

nkozyra 10y ago

The skepticism is totally warranted, but you have to really consider the strides made in just 100 years. There's practically a Moore's Law of medicine happening. We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.

segmondy 10y ago

People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time. Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.

DavidWanjiru 10y ago
It seems to me like the biggest things are impossible to see with a "normal" outlook. It's as if you either can't see the big thing, or you see it in a fantasy world, a fiction of some kind (science or otherwise). Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version connecting a handful of places and think, "Wow, this could connect EVERYONE!" They didn't stand there, looking at the terminals of two connected computers, and imagine a connected world like the one we live in today. They didn't talk about ecommerce and social media global events being reported on in near real time. No one had to roll their eyes, because no one was making these grand claims. I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there. When you look at all the big tech moments in (recent-ish) history, the car, modern computation, the PC, aviation, you don't see people coming out with these grand declarations before the fact. And it's not for lack of intelligent, visionary people. So it makes me wonder, whenever a person makes such grandiose plans, and they're not fiction writers, what's so different about them that they'd be able to see so far ahead? Maybe they're different. How would I know? But history makes me skeptical.
- sillysaurus3 10y ago

wyager 10y ago

General-purpose nanorobotics would pretty much allow us to do arbitrary medical procedures with cell-level accuracy. Cancer would be easy. Modifying brain structure would be easy. Pretty much everything would be easy.

srunni 10y ago
See chapter 3 ("Nanotechnology will not lead to super-abundance") of Against Transhumanism for a good argument for why this isn't so simple: http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Against_Transhumanism_1.0.pdf http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201... Summary 1. Lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness of molecules (Van der Waals force), constant random interactions (Brownian motion) at the microscale of cells means mechanistic intuitions from the macroscale don't apply. 2. High surface area (combined with VdW force) causes problems related to friction and energy dissipation.
- wyager 10y ago
  I didn't want to navigate that PDF, so I read the author's IEEE article, which I think has similar content. What a boring criticism! All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. His conclusion seems to be "mechanical engineering as with gears and pulleys won't work with nanobots". Duh! No one claimed otherwise. > mechanistic intuitions about the microscale don't apply. Obviously. Why would you or the author think nanotechnology optimists don't know this? Half the reason we don't have nanobots is because we don't yet have the engineering expertise and practical tools for these scales. The other half is that we're still working out efficient 3D nanofabrication. They are related problems. These are not physically insurmountable issues (as demonstrated thoroughly by organic life). There are a hundred different fields of study that are slowly eating away at the edges of the general purpose nanofabrication problem.
  - srunni 10y ago
    > All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. If they are so "easily approachable," feel free to solve them any time. I think you'll find that solving problems in living systems (let alone in the clinic) is much more challenging than it might appear from a CS/physics perspective (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1). I'm not saying it's not worth trying (it's certainly a more worthwhile endeavor than getting people to click on more ads), but that it's important to be realistic (for example, that all disease is unlikely to be cured by 2100).

fsloth 10y ago

" For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction?" If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).

MasterScrat 10y ago

> when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer": http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.php?comicid=1162 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...

sriku 10y ago

I, for one, am imagining a news item 84 years into the future - "how letting people share lunch pictures and stalk other people has led to the eradication of all diseases". The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.

nathan_f77 10y ago

I'm the opposite, I always roll my eyes when doctors say that AI/ML will never replace human doctors, or at least that it can never replace their human intuition or empathy. Human intuition is exactly what will be superseded by machine learning. I know empathy is important, and I read something about lonely people being less likely to have a fast recovery, but it just isn't all that important for accurate diagnoses or treatment. Further reading from Vinod Khosla: http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-what-doctors-do/ http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-...

nso95 10y ago

It's better to be optimistic and try than pessimistic and do nothing