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Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still pr
by EamonnMR 8y ago
Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still proteopathys. There's no real approach to curing those yet (at least not that I'm aware of.)
- magduf 8y ago>Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells. It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.
- JamesBarney 8y agoWhy do you think cancer is undefeatable? The risk of cancer rises substantially with age, and much of the increase in risk is probably due to the immune system malfunctioning.
- EamonnMR 8y agoWe aren't there yet.
- ethbro 8y agohttp://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-cancer-immunotherapy-20180604-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-c... Oncology + new genetic tools (just sequencing, not even CRISPR/CAS9) is making amazing progress. Things that would have been a death sentence 20 years ago now have reasonably hopeful mortality rates.