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Really quite a huge number of people are asking that question already. And a massively disproportionate amount of science funding goes towards cancer research.

by Blahah 13y ago

Really quite a huge number of people are asking that question already. And a massively disproportionate amount of science funding goes towards cancer research. Far more people in the world die of communicable and vector-borne diseases or illness related to malnourishment. These issues get much less research attention and funding because so many people in the western world are focussed on cancer. So while my heart goes out to the OP, and I hope his treatment is successful and his family are well provided for, I really don't think what we need is more people to focus on cancer. Lets focus on saving as many lives as possible.

melling 13y ago
Can you provide any data or any additional clarity? There's enough food produced in the world, for example, but it just doesn't get to the people who need it. I'd like to add that I wasn't saying that money is necessarily the answer. The power of crowd-sourcing, for instance, can help in other ways.
- Blahah 13y ago
  Sure. The WHO produces a report on causes of death wordwide[0]. Heart disease and stroke are the biggest killers, but these are, like cancer, really quite complex. Diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections kill a ridiculous number of people, but these are largely solved problems in the western world. Organisations like the Gates Foundation are doing great work exporting what we know about these diseases to the developing world, but governments do a pitiful amount. A number of chronic lifestyle diseases are rising: lung/throat cancer (due to smoking) and diabetes (due to eating sugar). My suggestion is that we should prioritise disease research and treatment based on how many people are dying and how easily those problems could be solved. But because funding bodies are all human, and all in the developed world, the disease they most fear is cancer. Regarding food security, there is technically enough food produced in the world to feed everyone, if we could solve the distribution and storage problems and prevent rich governments' protectionist interference in agricultural markets and corruption in developing nations' governments. But a large amount of that wastage is also not really suitable for human nutrition. Probably the fastest way to alleviate hunger is to enable each part of the world to feed itself with food produced nearby. Because we've reached the limits of arable land in much of the world, this means making more land suitable for food production, finding new ways to provide water, and making crops be able to grow better in different conditions. The FAO's State of Food Insecurity report[1] is a good summary. 0. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/. 1. http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/ http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/
mcv 13y ago
Yeah, the fact that millions of people still die of diseases we can treat, and are often even trivially preventable, is a far bigger social tragedy than there being some diseases we cannot cure yet. Life sucks sometimes, but there's so much more we could be doing to make it suck a lot less for a lot of people.
fasteo 13y ago
You are right for the wrong reason. The problem with cancer research is that we are trying to solve an unsolvable problem, wasting disproportionate amounts of money. In some sense, cancer is a symptom of a body gone havoc. Research should be targeted upstream, to really tackle the root cause. It is like trying to fix a hardware issue by patching software. Yes, you can get some results by implementing better error correction, retrying I/O operations, etc, but at the end, you just need to change the fucking RAM module. BTW, same thing with researching "illness related to malnourishment": Avoid malnourishment and then, there is no need to cure anything.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - fasteo 13y ago
    It´s kind of natural for me. I am a geek and I have a genetic disease that is slowly destroying my body. I find lots of similarities between us/computers and god/humans. I am not a religious - in the strict sense - person, but the phrase "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26) really applies to us, "makers" of computers.
- robogrowth 13y ago
  Youre 100% right and im not a food scientist, but i strongly feel the increase on cancer in humans can be attributed to the largely corn based diet humans are fed.. and the other terrible food items were fed by the powers that be. Everything is made with corn or corn byproducts and its not healthy at all.. not only that were feeding it to all our animals.. its a bad bad situation how our food supply is treated, and the more we push "lab grown food" the worse its going to get.
  - quasque 13y ago
    The rise in cancer incidence is mostly due to people living longer; advancing age is the biggest risk factor for most cancers. Anyway there are many other risk factors, and evidence for corn itself being one is scant. Alcohol intake, smoking, red meat consumption, lack of dietary fibre, high salt levels in one's diet and obesity are much more concerning, given the correlative evidence.
hessenwolf 13y ago
It's the other way around, actually. HIV gets a massively disproportionate amount of funds. Cancer gets disproportionately little. Also, as we are eliminating competing risks, cancer is emerging as a huge source of death in developing economies.
- Blahah 13y ago
  That's true only in the specific case of HIV in the USA - the funding in the USA for cancer vs HIV is about right for the global number of deaths from those diseases. Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is. For other diseases - malaria, dengue, hepatitis, typhoid etc., not to mention malnutrition - global spending is massively disporportionate in favour of cancer.
  - hueving 13y ago
    >Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is. "We haven't found a solution to this problem" is possibly the worst reason I've ever heard to cut back on research.
    - Blahah 13y ago
      I'm not suggesting cutting back on research, but distributing the research budget effectively. We need some long-term research into cancer cures, but not at the cost of the lives of people who can be saved today or in the very near future.
    - renata 13y ago
      Surely at some point it makes sense to cut your losses and redirect funding to research on other diseases. It's just an ROI calculation.
      - hueving 13y ago
        Only if there is nothing coming out of this research. Many things are often discovered when looking for something else.

by Blahah 13y ago

melling 13y ago

Can you provide any data or any additional clarity? There's enough food produced in the world, for example, but it just doesn't get to the people who need it. I'd like to add that I wasn't saying that money is necessarily the answer. The power of crowd-sourcing, for instance, can help in other ways.

Blahah 13y ago
Sure. The WHO produces a report on causes of death wordwide[0]. Heart disease and stroke are the biggest killers, but these are, like cancer, really quite complex. Diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections kill a ridiculous number of people, but these are largely solved problems in the western world. Organisations like the Gates Foundation are doing great work exporting what we know about these diseases to the developing world, but governments do a pitiful amount. A number of chronic lifestyle diseases are rising: lung/throat cancer (due to smoking) and diabetes (due to eating sugar). My suggestion is that we should prioritise disease research and treatment based on how many people are dying and how easily those problems could be solved. But because funding bodies are all human, and all in the developed world, the disease they most fear is cancer. Regarding food security, there is technically enough food produced in the world to feed everyone, if we could solve the distribution and storage problems and prevent rich governments' protectionist interference in agricultural markets and corruption in developing nations' governments. But a large amount of that wastage is also not really suitable for human nutrition. Probably the fastest way to alleviate hunger is to enable each part of the world to feed itself with food produced nearby. Because we've reached the limits of arable land in much of the world, this means making more land suitable for food production, finding new ways to provide water, and making crops be able to grow better in different conditions. The FAO's State of Food Insecurity report[1] is a good summary. 0. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/. 1. http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/ http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/

mcv 13y ago

Yeah, the fact that millions of people still die of diseases we can treat, and are often even trivially preventable, is a far bigger social tragedy than there being some diseases we cannot cure yet. Life sucks sometimes, but there's so much more we could be doing to make it suck a lot less for a lot of people.

fasteo 13y ago

You are right for the wrong reason. The problem with cancer research is that we are trying to solve an unsolvable problem, wasting disproportionate amounts of money. In some sense, cancer is a symptom of a body gone havoc. Research should be targeted upstream, to really tackle the root cause. It is like trying to fix a hardware issue by patching software. Yes, you can get some results by implementing better error correction, retrying I/O operations, etc, but at the end, you just need to change the fucking RAM module. BTW, same thing with researching "illness related to malnourishment": Avoid malnourishment and then, there is no need to cure anything.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- fasteo 13y ago
  It´s kind of natural for me. I am a geek and I have a genetic disease that is slowly destroying my body. I find lots of similarities between us/computers and god/humans. I am not a religious - in the strict sense - person, but the phrase "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26) really applies to us, "makers" of computers.
robogrowth 13y ago
Youre 100% right and im not a food scientist, but i strongly feel the increase on cancer in humans can be attributed to the largely corn based diet humans are fed.. and the other terrible food items were fed by the powers that be. Everything is made with corn or corn byproducts and its not healthy at all.. not only that were feeding it to all our animals.. its a bad bad situation how our food supply is treated, and the more we push "lab grown food" the worse its going to get.
- quasque 13y ago
  The rise in cancer incidence is mostly due to people living longer; advancing age is the biggest risk factor for most cancers. Anyway there are many other risk factors, and evidence for corn itself being one is scant. Alcohol intake, smoking, red meat consumption, lack of dietary fibre, high salt levels in one's diet and obesity are much more concerning, given the correlative evidence.

hessenwolf 13y ago

It's the other way around, actually. HIV gets a massively disproportionate amount of funds. Cancer gets disproportionately little. Also, as we are eliminating competing risks, cancer is emerging as a huge source of death in developing economies.

Blahah 13y ago
That's true only in the specific case of HIV in the USA - the funding in the USA for cancer vs HIV is about right for the global number of deaths from those diseases. Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is. For other diseases - malaria, dengue, hepatitis, typhoid etc., not to mention malnutrition - global spending is massively disporportionate in favour of cancer.
- hueving 13y ago
  >Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is. "We haven't found a solution to this problem" is possibly the worst reason I've ever heard to cut back on research.
  - Blahah 13y ago
    I'm not suggesting cutting back on research, but distributing the research budget effectively. We need some long-term research into cancer cures, but not at the cost of the lives of people who can be saved today or in the very near future.
  - renata 13y ago
    Surely at some point it makes sense to cut your losses and redirect funding to research on other diseases. It's just an ROI calculation.
    - hueving 13y ago
      Only if there is nothing coming out of this research. Many things are often discovered when looking for something else.