9 ms·

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simp

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding when to cure cancers.

phoe-krk 4y ago
In this context, your "simply" is probably the greatest understatement I've read on HN in 2023 so far. There's nothing simple about coordinating people like this, starting from facilitating communication across individual people to bootstrap the process and ending at grabbing enough attention of people on top to gain the necessary world-scale attention towards the problem.
- meghan_rain 4y ago
  hahah it's the infamous HN Dropbox comment but on steroids
  - CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
    My startup idea is "Uber for Cancer!"
- melling 4y ago
  “It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding…” You misread what I said. I never said it was a simple problem, I said it was simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem. The Apollo program, for comparison, took 400,000 people a decade to get to the moon, and 2.5% of GDP. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program If we agree the problem will be solved, then it’s just a matter of deciding to do it sooner than much later. And along the way, fewer people die. So, if we try to do it in 10 years, but it takes 20, we still win.
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    No, you misread what I said. "Simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem" is not "simple" by any means. There's no political incentive to solve cancer since isn't a problem that brings political advantage when solved, like there's no political "race to the moon" with a rival country that happened with Apollo. Race to the moon decided because USA and USSR went into a game of who gets there first; cancer has no such ongoing game and it's a much less spectacular aspect with results that are invisible when compared to videos taken on the surface of the moon. Speaking of results, solving cancer would also mean that people get to live even longer than they do now, which, in an already locally overpopulated and locally aging society, would generate many more issues that death by cancer "conveniently" "solves" at the moment.
    - echelon 4y ago
      You're lasering in on the word "simple". Human civilization is full of optimization gradients. We choose to spend our time and money on certain pathways. OP was musing that amid all the things we spend money and effort on, cancer seems to get too little. If only we could choose to "simply" devote more of our collective energies to it. It's a mere musing, nothing more. We're kind of powerless to these forces of how people choose to spend their lives. Solving cancer itself is by no means "simple". But neither were a lot of the things we've accomplished. We'll get there in time, but it's easy for the brain to imagine a faster path if we had more institutional funding and minds on the task. That's what's simple. You're correct that we won't get people on board with this. We don't consider the recruitment of support or the opportunity cost losses or the myriad of other changes necessary. But this is all just an intellectual exercise in wishful thinking anyway.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Seeing as you're getting tripped up on the word "simple", the sentiment can be rephrased without using that word: Where there is a will, there is a way. If people can be convinced to do something, they will. History proves this as an absolute fact.
robocat 4y ago
Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventing all copying faults, or detecting all copying faults and fixing them. This is hard - essentially requires completely replacing the normal cell splitting process, and/or the DNA checking process. Removing viruses from our environment would help reduce some cancer problems. Also note, old age is in large part due to telomere shortening: that is a process evolved to help fight against cancer growth (many cancerous cells reproduce and are then killed by apoptosis due to reaching a fixed number of cell reproductions).
- dedev5 4y ago
  Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?
  - robocat 4y ago
    The immune system is fiendishly complex: the technical debt of a system of programming by random mutations. Answer: I don’t think that our immune system would be weaker for novel viruses, because our immune system isn’t trained to work on unknown viruses. The immune system does work on known viruses, however for the virus to be detected, a person needs to have been infected the first time: so by induction it doesn’t matter for one person. Although population effects might matter (herd immunity, societal systems breakdown). Background: The immune system starts with a random generation of attacks. As a foetus the immune system learns to NOT detect its own cells (by removing any self-attacks). The immune system is left with the ability to detect a variety of things that are not its own cells. The immune system also trains to not attack common environmental factors, which prevents allergies, but AFAIK that training stops within a few months of birth (there is a special organ for this). There is a popular theory that if the immune system isn’t given something to attack then it attacks itself (creating auto-immune diseases) so we should “eat dirt” to prevent that. AFAIK there is no scientific consensus about that. Certainly we have counter-examples where viruses cause autoimmune diseases e.g. Epstein-Barr virus causing Multiple Sclerosis. The immune system also trains to be able to quickly attack things it has attacked before. So it provides protection against some variation of some repeat viral infections because new variants might have the same attack point. This works better against repeat bacterial infections, because bacteria have more features to detect, so the immune system is more likely to have some defence against different variants. This part of the eat-dirt theory is a bit better, but still impossible to calculate the costs versus benefits. Personally I don’t try to “eat dirt”, but I mostly make little effort to avoid “dirty” things because the effort seems mentally costly (avoidance that worked would be socially damaging, IMHO).
inglor_cz 4y ago
Compared to current expenditure and human resources spent on treating and understanding cancer, what would constitute a real "decision to cure cancer" for you? Twice as much, ten times as much? Do billionaires and powerful politicians (or their loved ones) deliberately die of cancer because they collectively decided not to find a cure for cancer? Are you willing to entertain the idea that we don't yet fully understand cancer or even our own biology, and that said understanding may not be a "simple" function of money and brains, but requires a bit of luck as well? Most historical breakthroughs in science weren't an outcome of bruteforcing the problem with shitloads of money and manpower. People tend to fixate on the Manhattan Project too much; it is not a great analogy, because by 1940, the understanding of the fundamentals was basically complete. We don't understand cancer nearly as well as we understood nuclear fission at that time. Hell, we don't understand aging very well yet, and cancer is a typical disease of old age.
- melling 4y ago
  Apollo project aka Moon Landing was the analogy. I do believe that was brute forced. And as I already pointed out, even if we fail, we can still save millions of lives. Plus the cost to treat people is spiraling out of control. https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20Documents/Costs-of-Cancer-2020-10222020.pdf https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20D...
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Once again, the physics behind space travel was already well known and it was mostly the technicalities that needed addressing. Compared to human metabolism, navigation in space is rather straightforward math. A lot of the necessary stuff was already discovered by Newton's time, in the 17th century. We know a lot less about our own bodies than about celestial bodies, simply because relevant observation is nowhere near as easy. Observing and measuring activity of cells in vivo, within living human beings themselves, is a fundamentally hard problem. We can do a lot of stuff in mice, but mice are rather different from us and results in mice usually don't translate to workable therapies for people. Our problems with cancer, Alzheimer's etc. are problems of understanding, not technicalities. Imagine trying to fly to the Moon without knowledge of Kepler's gravity laws. No amount of money can compensate for such massive ignorance.

phoe-krk 4y ago

In this context, your "simply" is probably the greatest understatement I've read on HN in 2023 so far. There's nothing simple about coordinating people like this, starting from facilitating communication across individual people to bootstrap the process and ending at grabbing enough attention of people on top to gain the necessary world-scale attention towards the problem.

meghan_rain 4y ago
hahah it's the infamous HN Dropbox comment but on steroids
- CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
  My startup idea is "Uber for Cancer!"
melling 4y ago
“It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding…” You misread what I said. I never said it was a simple problem, I said it was simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem. The Apollo program, for comparison, took 400,000 people a decade to get to the moon, and 2.5% of GDP. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program If we agree the problem will be solved, then it’s just a matter of deciding to do it sooner than much later. And along the way, fewer people die. So, if we try to do it in 10 years, but it takes 20, we still win.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  No, you misread what I said. "Simply a matter of deciding to solve the problem" is not "simple" by any means. There's no political incentive to solve cancer since isn't a problem that brings political advantage when solved, like there's no political "race to the moon" with a rival country that happened with Apollo. Race to the moon decided because USA and USSR went into a game of who gets there first; cancer has no such ongoing game and it's a much less spectacular aspect with results that are invisible when compared to videos taken on the surface of the moon. Speaking of results, solving cancer would also mean that people get to live even longer than they do now, which, in an already locally overpopulated and locally aging society, would generate many more issues that death by cancer "conveniently" "solves" at the moment.
  - echelon 4y ago
    You're lasering in on the word "simple". Human civilization is full of optimization gradients. We choose to spend our time and money on certain pathways. OP was musing that amid all the things we spend money and effort on, cancer seems to get too little. If only we could choose to "simply" devote more of our collective energies to it. It's a mere musing, nothing more. We're kind of powerless to these forces of how people choose to spend their lives. Solving cancer itself is by no means "simple". But neither were a lot of the things we've accomplished. We'll get there in time, but it's easy for the brain to imagine a faster path if we had more institutional funding and minds on the task. That's what's simple. You're correct that we won't get people on board with this. We don't consider the recruitment of support or the opportunity cost losses or the myriad of other changes necessary. But this is all just an intellectual exercise in wishful thinking anyway.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Seeing as you're getting tripped up on the word "simple", the sentiment can be rephrased without using that word: Where there is a will, there is a way. If people can be convinced to do something, they will. History proves this as an absolute fact.

robocat 4y ago

Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventing all copying faults, or detecting all copying faults and fixing them. This is hard - essentially requires completely replacing the normal cell splitting process, and/or the DNA checking process. Removing viruses from our environment would help reduce some cancer problems. Also note, old age is in large part due to telomere shortening: that is a process evolved to help fight against cancer growth (many cancerous cells reproduce and are then killed by apoptosis due to reaching a fixed number of cell reproductions).

dedev5 4y ago
Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?
- robocat 4y ago
  The immune system is fiendishly complex: the technical debt of a system of programming by random mutations. Answer: I don’t think that our immune system would be weaker for novel viruses, because our immune system isn’t trained to work on unknown viruses. The immune system does work on known viruses, however for the virus to be detected, a person needs to have been infected the first time: so by induction it doesn’t matter for one person. Although population effects might matter (herd immunity, societal systems breakdown). Background: The immune system starts with a random generation of attacks. As a foetus the immune system learns to NOT detect its own cells (by removing any self-attacks). The immune system is left with the ability to detect a variety of things that are not its own cells. The immune system also trains to not attack common environmental factors, which prevents allergies, but AFAIK that training stops within a few months of birth (there is a special organ for this). There is a popular theory that if the immune system isn’t given something to attack then it attacks itself (creating auto-immune diseases) so we should “eat dirt” to prevent that. AFAIK there is no scientific consensus about that. Certainly we have counter-examples where viruses cause autoimmune diseases e.g. Epstein-Barr virus causing Multiple Sclerosis. The immune system also trains to be able to quickly attack things it has attacked before. So it provides protection against some variation of some repeat viral infections because new variants might have the same attack point. This works better against repeat bacterial infections, because bacteria have more features to detect, so the immune system is more likely to have some defence against different variants. This part of the eat-dirt theory is a bit better, but still impossible to calculate the costs versus benefits. Personally I don’t try to “eat dirt”, but I mostly make little effort to avoid “dirty” things because the effort seems mentally costly (avoidance that worked would be socially damaging, IMHO).

inglor_cz 4y ago

Compared to current expenditure and human resources spent on treating and understanding cancer, what would constitute a real "decision to cure cancer" for you? Twice as much, ten times as much? Do billionaires and powerful politicians (or their loved ones) deliberately die of cancer because they collectively decided not to find a cure for cancer? Are you willing to entertain the idea that we don't yet fully understand cancer or even our own biology, and that said understanding may not be a "simple" function of money and brains, but requires a bit of luck as well? Most historical breakthroughs in science weren't an outcome of bruteforcing the problem with shitloads of money and manpower. People tend to fixate on the Manhattan Project too much; it is not a great analogy, because by 1940, the understanding of the fundamentals was basically complete. We don't understand cancer nearly as well as we understood nuclear fission at that time. Hell, we don't understand aging very well yet, and cancer is a typical disease of old age.

melling 4y ago
Apollo project aka Moon Landing was the analogy. I do believe that was brute forced. And as I already pointed out, even if we fail, we can still save millions of lives. Plus the cost to treat people is spiraling out of control. https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20Documents/Costs-of-Cancer-2020-10222020.pdf https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20D...
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Once again, the physics behind space travel was already well known and it was mostly the technicalities that needed addressing. Compared to human metabolism, navigation in space is rather straightforward math. A lot of the necessary stuff was already discovered by Newton's time, in the 17th century. We know a lot less about our own bodies than about celestial bodies, simply because relevant observation is nowhere near as easy. Observing and measuring activity of cells in vivo, within living human beings themselves, is a fundamentally hard problem. We can do a lot of stuff in mice, but mice are rather different from us and results in mice usually don't translate to workable therapies for people. Our problems with cancer, Alzheimer's etc. are problems of understanding, not technicalities. Imagine trying to fly to the Moon without knowledge of Kepler's gravity laws. No amount of money can compensate for such massive ignorance.