6 ms·

The sensationalist assertions made in this article (particularly in the headline) don't follow from the results that the article describes. Part of the blame f

by jboy 12y ago

The sensationalist assertions made in this article (particularly in the headline) don't follow from the results that the article describes. Part of the blame for this sensationalism seems to fall at the feet of the original scientist himself (Bosch). He makes an unfounded leap from the biological result that cancer seems to be an intrinsic property of genetic processes in cells (and the statements "You have to interfere with fundamental pathways", "It's a web of interactions" and "It's very difficult to do") to the assertion "will probably never be completely eradicated". Difficult is not the same as impossible. He follows with more sensationalism: "You carry a time bomb in your body when you're born," he said. "It can explode early in life, or middle age or later." I suppose it's understandable; he's probably just trying to get some publicity for his team's long-running research on hydra. And even he admits "that doesn't mean that, with a patient who develops cancer, there's nothing you can do." But then the hedging of "probably" and "completely" was discarded by the article writers for a more sensationalist article and headline.

idlewords 12y ago
I'm not sure why you see these claims as sensationalist. The lifetime risk of cancer is 1 in 2 (for men), and both the rate of incidence and the mortality rate are about the same today as they were in 1975. This despite the massive increase in our understanding of the phenomenon. The claim that cancer probably never will be eradicated seems pretty defensible. Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. It's perfectly possible for us to have a complete understanding of cancer and find that we still can't eliminate it.
- ximeng 12y ago
  http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances-in-focus/cancer http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances... 5-year survival rates has gone from 50% to 68%, other statistics are improving as well, although not particularly quickly.
  - danieltillett 12y ago
    Most of this increase is due to earlier diagnosis. I really hate 5 year survival rates as a measure of success as it is almost totally meaningless. We know most cancers have lead times from initial mutation to symptomatic diagnose of 15 to 30 years. This means that if I was able to make a test that could detected cancer 10 years after initiation I could in one swoop make the 5 year survival rate 100% for all cancers without changing age at death by one day.
    - ximeng 12y ago
      Some good news in there though: "Treatment for this disease has become so effective that 80% of patients with metastatic testicular cancer can now be cured. Thirty-five years ago, 95% of these patients died, usually within 1 year of diagnosis." From idlewords' post it might sound like we've made no improvement, but instead it is more like slow and patchy improvement.
      - idlewords 12y ago
        Yeah for some specific cancers the progress has been incredible. But the dream that 'cancer' is one thing that can be cured has gone away. The point I wanted to stress was that our progress has been much more modest than many people imagine, given the amount of talk about revolutionary treatment and the power of modern medicine.
- possibilistic 12y ago
  > Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. I love this quote, and I'm totally going to steal it. There's just something about the futurists and singularity folks that mimics the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you learn, the more you recognize that we're still operating on Cro-Magnon brains. All of our magnificent toys are merely low-hanging fruit in deference to the problems that seem to really matter.
  - adventured 12y ago
    I don't consider the microprocessor in my smart phone with its billions of transistors, and the ever-faster global internet and wireless systems that enable nearly instant (certainly to human perception it's nearly instant) global communication to billions of people at any time, to be low hanging fruit. I consider that extraordinary, and the exact opposite of low hanging fruit. It's hundreds of years of incremental progress across dozens of fields, resulting in reaching very high hanging fruit in the form of an iPhone and everything that goes with it. I consider such amazing communication technology to be every bit as valuable to social beings such as humans, and to our general societal structures, as curing cancer is.
    - possibilistic 12y ago
      Humor me here a little here. Search and traversal become increasingly difficult as any graph grows in size. It's not hard to generalize this to the graph of scientific and engineering knowledge. To maintain the connectedness of our ideas, we must either leave amazing literature and documentation or we must constantly seek to foster connections between those of separate, heterogenous fields and disciplines. Unless there is movement of ideas through collective human consciousness, key insights cannot percolate through to the point where they have the greatest impact. (For instance, not long ago biologists were still using Perl. :P) At some point, the time it takes for certain information to spread across the graph grows substantial enough that discoveries are simply repeated over. Science and technology require ever-increasing levels of specialization. The network topology isn't going to get easier for the human mind to traverse. Imagine what kind of information lies just beyond your reach--the kind of insights that might truly propel you ahead, to reach your Eureka. If only you knew what you were missing out on. On the flip side, do you ever think about the places where your contributions would be the most impactful? These problems are somewhat symptomatic of the fact that we haven't breached the complexity threshold of what our brains are capable of performing. We may have computer-aided tools to get us beyond some classes of problem--search and mathematical modeling come to mind. Still, our mastering of breadth at depth, our powers of abstraction and of reasoning, all have a hard limit. Everything we've ever done falls neatly within defined lines. Nothing being done today is substantially harder than what the previous generation did with its much more limited set of knowledge. (Have we discovered our generation's calculus or quantum mechanics? Advancements like that are special, truly rare, set apart by hundreds of years.) Take your smartphone, for instance. You can't look at the following block diagrams and tell me they're too difficult to reason about: * http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exynos-5-dual-mobile-processor-block-diagram.gif http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exy... * http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png * http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/arma15-blockdiagram.png http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-co... (Yes, I know the implementation details go much deeper and that these diagrams are meant for ease of conveying knowledge. You still understand them. And given time, a diligent student can learn to contribute to processor design using the pre-existing domain knowledge.) Do you have a sense or appreciation for how complex the physical and chemical reality is by contrast? We can only partially understand minute samples taken from real systems. It's not especially owing to our primitive equipment or tooling; it's the sheer complexity that baffles us. There are things like helium atoms--we don't understand them. There's Hartree-Fock, but that's an approximation. I find it hard to be beholden to the majesty of a phone when no one can stand up and explain a helium atom. I mean, don't you find it a little bit amusing we're still caking onto SGML, shoveling it onto handsets, and yet we don't understand the interstitial gas between us and the cell tower? The stuff we're breathing. Anecdotes from the early days of AI research suggest that we didn't think we'd still be writing code imperatively, yet here we are writing Javascript module frameworks and the like. We have a stunningly powerful ability to underestimate how long and difficult things are. We are also often satisfied in rediscovery. We're concerned with how to perform delivery in San Francisco, yet... can you imagine the vast number of computations the universe is performing every time a protein isomerizes? I wager it outweighs all of the computing power we have available to us through modern technology today. The modern smartphone could never compete in this arena; we would be comparing something not even at the level of a bacteria to the most omnipotent of gods. I'm not saying that one day we'll design computers out of polymers in solution. I don't even know if we'll survive as a species long enough to care. I'm just asking you to wonder. Look to nature. Can you sense how incredibly infinitesimal and primitive we are as a species when you look up at the night sky? We've been feeding off of the cosmologically low hanging fruit, and we're still in the nursery. We spend on average 20 years learning what we need to begin making our cornerstone contributions to society. At that point, how much longer do we remain productive? It's a limited window with which we have to collapse all the reverse salients. Damn shortness of human productive lifetimes, and all of that. Oh well, there's always a new generation with which to start fresh. Rinse, repeat. Stand on a few more shoulders, see a little more of the picture. Fill your mind with what might be possible. Let it be dissatisfied when you cannot reach a conclusion to a problem. Don't ever put a bound on the type of problems you're curious about. You'll scoff at press releases. Everything in our generation is transient, scaffolding for the next one gestating. (Sorry for rambling. And also--I still hold that my flappy bird machine not even in the same galaxy when it comes to being as cool as science. It's a toy for which there will always be one better. How could it ever be so magnificent as the universe I get a few short years to experience firsthand?)
JulianMorrison 12y ago
I guess it depends on what eradicated means. We probably can't genetically or medically engineer humans never to generate cancers. That's what this guy seems to be saying: cancer is a consequence of normal operation, not a flaw or a disease. We probably can get good enough at cleaning up the cancers, that our continual generation of them is no longer an issue.

by jboy 12y ago

idlewords 12y ago

I'm not sure why you see these claims as sensationalist. The lifetime risk of cancer is 1 in 2 (for men), and both the rate of incidence and the mortality rate are about the same today as they were in 1975. This despite the massive increase in our understanding of the phenomenon. The claim that cancer probably never will be eradicated seems pretty defensible. Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. It's perfectly possible for us to have a complete understanding of cancer and find that we still can't eliminate it.

ximeng 12y ago
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances-in-focus/cancer http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/cancer-advances... 5-year survival rates has gone from 50% to 68%, other statistics are improving as well, although not particularly quickly.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Most of this increase is due to earlier diagnosis. I really hate 5 year survival rates as a measure of success as it is almost totally meaningless. We know most cancers have lead times from initial mutation to symptomatic diagnose of 15 to 30 years. This means that if I was able to make a test that could detected cancer 10 years after initiation I could in one swoop make the 5 year survival rate 100% for all cancers without changing age at death by one day.
  - ximeng 12y ago
    Some good news in there though: "Treatment for this disease has become so effective that 80% of patients with metastatic testicular cancer can now be cured. Thirty-five years ago, 95% of these patients died, usually within 1 year of diagnosis." From idlewords' post it might sound like we've made no improvement, but instead it is more like slow and patchy improvement.
    - idlewords 12y ago
      Yeah for some specific cancers the progress has been incredible. But the dream that 'cancer' is one thing that can be cured has gone away. The point I wanted to stress was that our progress has been much more modest than many people imagine, given the amount of talk about revolutionary treatment and the power of modern medicine.
possibilistic 12y ago
> Notice how it's the people who study it who are the least sanguine in their predictions. I love this quote, and I'm totally going to steal it. There's just something about the futurists and singularity folks that mimics the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you learn, the more you recognize that we're still operating on Cro-Magnon brains. All of our magnificent toys are merely low-hanging fruit in deference to the problems that seem to really matter.
- adventured 12y ago
  I don't consider the microprocessor in my smart phone with its billions of transistors, and the ever-faster global internet and wireless systems that enable nearly instant (certainly to human perception it's nearly instant) global communication to billions of people at any time, to be low hanging fruit. I consider that extraordinary, and the exact opposite of low hanging fruit. It's hundreds of years of incremental progress across dozens of fields, resulting in reaching very high hanging fruit in the form of an iPhone and everything that goes with it. I consider such amazing communication technology to be every bit as valuable to social beings such as humans, and to our general societal structures, as curing cancer is.
  - possibilistic 12y ago
    Humor me here a little here. Search and traversal become increasingly difficult as any graph grows in size. It's not hard to generalize this to the graph of scientific and engineering knowledge. To maintain the connectedness of our ideas, we must either leave amazing literature and documentation or we must constantly seek to foster connections between those of separate, heterogenous fields and disciplines. Unless there is movement of ideas through collective human consciousness, key insights cannot percolate through to the point where they have the greatest impact. (For instance, not long ago biologists were still using Perl. :P) At some point, the time it takes for certain information to spread across the graph grows substantial enough that discoveries are simply repeated over. Science and technology require ever-increasing levels of specialization. The network topology isn't going to get easier for the human mind to traverse. Imagine what kind of information lies just beyond your reach--the kind of insights that might truly propel you ahead, to reach your Eureka. If only you knew what you were missing out on. On the flip side, do you ever think about the places where your contributions would be the most impactful? These problems are somewhat symptomatic of the fact that we haven't breached the complexity threshold of what our brains are capable of performing. We may have computer-aided tools to get us beyond some classes of problem--search and mathematical modeling come to mind. Still, our mastering of breadth at depth, our powers of abstraction and of reasoning, all have a hard limit. Everything we've ever done falls neatly within defined lines. Nothing being done today is substantially harder than what the previous generation did with its much more limited set of knowledge. (Have we discovered our generation's calculus or quantum mechanics? Advancements like that are special, truly rare, set apart by hundreds of years.) Take your smartphone, for instance. You can't look at the following block diagrams and tell me they're too difficult to reason about: * http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exynos-5-dual-mobile-processor-block-diagram.gif http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exy... * http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png * http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/arma15-blockdiagram.png http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-co... (Yes, I know the implementation details go much deeper and that these diagrams are meant for ease of conveying knowledge. You still understand them. And given time, a diligent student can learn to contribute to processor design using the pre-existing domain knowledge.) Do you have a sense or appreciation for how complex the physical and chemical reality is by contrast? We can only partially understand minute samples taken from real systems. It's not especially owing to our primitive equipment or tooling; it's the sheer complexity that baffles us. There are things like helium atoms--we don't understand them. There's Hartree-Fock, but that's an approximation. I find it hard to be beholden to the majesty of a phone when no one can stand up and explain a helium atom. I mean, don't you find it a little bit amusing we're still caking onto SGML, shoveling it onto handsets, and yet we don't understand the interstitial gas between us and the cell tower? The stuff we're breathing. Anecdotes from the early days of AI research suggest that we didn't think we'd still be writing code imperatively, yet here we are writing Javascript module frameworks and the like. We have a stunningly powerful ability to underestimate how long and difficult things are. We are also often satisfied in rediscovery. We're concerned with how to perform delivery in San Francisco, yet... can you imagine the vast number of computations the universe is performing every time a protein isomerizes? I wager it outweighs all of the computing power we have available to us through modern technology today. The modern smartphone could never compete in this arena; we would be comparing something not even at the level of a bacteria to the most omnipotent of gods. I'm not saying that one day we'll design computers out of polymers in solution. I don't even know if we'll survive as a species long enough to care. I'm just asking you to wonder. Look to nature. Can you sense how incredibly infinitesimal and primitive we are as a species when you look up at the night sky? We've been feeding off of the cosmologically low hanging fruit, and we're still in the nursery. We spend on average 20 years learning what we need to begin making our cornerstone contributions to society. At that point, how much longer do we remain productive? It's a limited window with which we have to collapse all the reverse salients. Damn shortness of human productive lifetimes, and all of that. Oh well, there's always a new generation with which to start fresh. Rinse, repeat. Stand on a few more shoulders, see a little more of the picture. Fill your mind with what might be possible. Let it be dissatisfied when you cannot reach a conclusion to a problem. Don't ever put a bound on the type of problems you're curious about. You'll scoff at press releases. Everything in our generation is transient, scaffolding for the next one gestating. (Sorry for rambling. And also--I still hold that my flappy bird machine not even in the same galaxy when it comes to being as cool as science. It's a toy for which there will always be one better. How could it ever be so magnificent as the universe I get a few short years to experience firsthand?)

JulianMorrison 12y ago

I guess it depends on what eradicated means. We probably can't genetically or medically engineer humans never to generate cancers. That's what this guy seems to be saying: cancer is a consequence of normal operation, not a flaw or a disease. We probably can get good enough at cleaning up the cancers, that our continual generation of them is no longer an issue.