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You're right. It's very important, more so than putting a human on Mars. What I meant is that cancer is far more than just one thing to cure. I have a friend w
by maguay 12y ago
You're right. It's very important, more so than putting a human on Mars.
What I meant is that cancer is far more than just one thing to cure. I have a friend who's a cancer researcher working with immunotherapy, one of the more promising new directions for cancer research. And yet, even if we can cure, say, leukemia with it, there's still other cancers that may or may not be curable in the same way.
Still, it is a hope that one day we'll have a cure for all the varied types of cancer. It's still not going to be easy.
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoI get you, but I still think that even scientific research is largely a matter of committing the societal effort rather than of some Mysterious Power of Science -- which is how people seem to act about cancer research. And it's quite frustrating to me, because I hear lots of people say things like, "Why should we fund cancer research? Cancer is a thousand different incurable little things that always get you eventually. Disease and death will always be a part of old age, so why are we throwing public money down the drain?" You know, like they already do with fusion research, and most other forms of clean-energy development. Then, a decade after they said that sort of thing, someone ends up in another stupid war for control of fossil-fuels, and on net, tens of thousands of people die painfully and pointlessly because a few despairniks found it more convenient to claim science doesn't work than to spend even a little effort on actually doing some good for the world.
- maguay 12y agoI'd love to see a world that invested all of its military spending into medical research instead. We could cure so much if we did so.
- claudius 12y agoWouldn’t seeing that world while not being able to live in it rather depressing? And while I have to agree that medical research is important, there is not just medical research which is underfunded. The things we could end up with when providing more funding for even completely theoretical physics (say, String Theory) are thoroughly amazing. On the other hand, there is a lot of hit-or-miss in these areas, probably not quite dissimilar to how funding for startups works: 95% of all projects/ideas will fail within the first few weeks/months and not provide any useful results whereas the last 5% make up for thousands of years (quite literally) of research and suffering.
- scott_s 12y agoI'm currently reading "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It's an amazing book, and I'm learning a lot. I think you would, too. He talks at length on the societal efforts to "cure cancer", and how those came about. I think you're under the impression that we don't spend much money or effort on cancer research, but we do. We spend a lot of both. I suppose we can debate if it's "enough." It is, however, a ridiculously hard problem. There needed to be, and still need to be, fundamental scientific breakthroughs in order for treatments to progress. Anyway, I'm not so much trying to counter what you've said. Rather, I want to point you to a book that I think covers topics that you are clearly interested in.