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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating! In case folks don't know, trypsin is a proteolytic enzyme produced in the pancreas. It helps your body digest proteins.

I'm assuming that these scientists had the exact same problem that scientists do today: xenographs (grafting tumor cells into health animals) isn't the best model. That issue still is a problem today.

That said, we've come a long way. It wasn't until ~40 years after this article that the nitrogen mustards (chemotherapies) were actually put into clinical practice. Their clinical usefulness was only realized when a bunch of military folks/civilians were exposed to mustard gas and they noticed their lymphocyte count decreased. A doctor noticed it and thought "maybe we can use this in lymphoma (where cancer produces too many lymphocytes)"

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"we've come a long way"

That's your takeaway? It's like we're reading two completely different versions of HN ;) I'm so jaded from all these medical and scientific miracles of which we're constantly on the cusp. I wish there were a content-blocker that somehow removed links to any story regarding a breakthrough that hasn't already occurred. Future "cures" and "revolutionary treatments" are a dime a dozen, and nobody bothers to write an article when they don't actually pan out.

Yes, it's a problem. Where are all the articles about confirmed breakthroughs, say of work that was done 10 years ago? Are there really so few of those?

We have, overall, come a long way medically in the past hundred years, but I'd be very interested in an article that looked at how much of that was revolutionary breakthroughs and how much was incremental. And how much was both: e.g. being able to transplant many organs for the first time in the 20th century, and then the gradual increase in post-transplant life-expectancies since then. (And that's an area with a potentially scary future, too, if the superbug scare proves to be more real/less media hype than many positive "breakthroughs.")

I had no idea that chemotherapy is basically intravenous mustard gas. Thanks for the insight!

To be clear, some chemotherapies are mustard gas derivatives. Others act similarly (disrupting DNA), but work through other mechanisms.

Treanda (bendamustine) is a great example of a nitrogen mustard that is still used in chemotherapy today. They've modified it a bit so it has better pharmacodynamics, but it's very similar to mustard gas!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendamustine

Chemotherapy in general is mostly just poison. The general idea being that your body is more capable of bouncing back from damage than mutated cancer cells that have a runaway growth problem.

It's a bit more than that. Cancerous cells will tend to absorb more chemotherapy drugs than non-cancerous cells do, because rapid cell division means that they're absorbing more of everything.

>Chemotherapy in general is mostly just poison.

"slash, poison and burn" for surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy - a phrase from a well know cancer doctor mentioned on NPR couple days ago.

As another commenter mentioned it isn't just a poison though. Just for example - the artemisinin - the anti-malaria drug that was discussed recently being the subject of the recent Nobel prize - is looking promising so far as a [low toxicity] chemotherapy drug due to the same super-oxide interaction with iron-rich cells that makes it an anti-malaria drug as cancer cells are iron-rich too.

great insight from the articles and comments.

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