Cancer Hospital Ads Deceive Patients About Their Chances Of Survival

Here, we predominantly see adverts for: basic over-the-counter painkillers, cold/flu "remedies" (winter) and hayfever/allergy remedies (summer).

It's really quite jarring visiting the US and watching TV there. Not only because of the seriousness of the drugs they advertise, but also the sheer volume of pharmaceutical ads. I swear it often felt like 50% of the ads were for prescription drugs. Really weird.

In Poland they started advertising those by boasting about "side effects" such as losing weight ....

The headwinds are persistent: credentialism and a glut of PhDs that are way more qualified than me. I'm constantly meeting bio people going the other way - into tech.

Despite that, I'm stubbornly going to keep going because like you say, the potential of Biotech to reduce human suffering seems so much greater.

I worry about becoming pigeonholed by my background, or falling into the many pitfalls you point out like screwed up incentives or narrow funding paths. More than anything, I want to work on something important and meaningful, like a disease.

Roughly speaking, my current idea is to learn the basics which I'm in the process of doing now [1], get basic credentials, and then find data on causes of suffering, take the first derivative, sort descending, and go. I know it's naive, but it seems like the right thing to do.

[1] https://freeradical13.github.io/

So no, I don't feel guilty for anything. And despite the general feeling, not everyone in here is trying to build the next Facebook. We're just ordinary guys trying to make a (comfortable) living.

Last but not least, you make it sound like a smartass hacker could discover the cure for cancer or Alzheimer. It's not that easy. If pharmaceutical companies with decades of considerable funding and teams of hundreds of highly specialized scientists haven't figured it out what makes you think that we could? We're smart, sure, but not that smart.

Perhaps the real market opportunity is in facilitating this kind of research, rather than just digging another mine.

Do you know what website you are on? It’s closer to 9.5, I think.

Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.

We live at a time when many believe that if there was just enough money and work going into we could eliminate all ailments and be living to 200, if not outright headed towards a Kurzweilian future - which is seemingly radically more far off as the years pass. But I can't help but consider that this optimism is happening at the same time that we can't manage to cure the common cold. And many of the most revolutionary steps we've had in medicine happened many decades and most often by purely serendipitous happening -- and not directed and heavily funded research.

For instance chemotherapy is still the front line treatment for cancer and its discovery came when a couple of doctors noticed that victims of mustard gas in the first World War had surprisingly low immune cell counts. As another example penicillin, the first and father of all antibiotics, was also discovered completely by accident. A scientist accidentally left a petri dish containing some bacteria open. It had been contaminated by some mold from a nearby window, but that mold seemed to have inhibited the bacterial expansion. Lo and behold, antibiotics emerge as a byproduct of mold on rotting decay. It took years for that discovery to be accepted even after the discovery had published and spoken about as much as he could. Probably because it's defies all intuition and is certainly not a path anybody would have ever intentionally gone down, except with hindsight. Vaccines? Similar story. Hey I noticed all these milk maids, that have caught cow pox before, are immune to small pox for some reason. Do other people become immune if exposed to cow pox? Cool, they do!

By contrast, medical progress in recent decades has been extremely asymptotic. Perhaps this could be because we've only spent $x trillion instead of $x+$y trillion, but it could also mean that we are simply hitting a genuine asymptote where we'll continue to be able to make progress but will see ever smaller returns. The current era of extreme optimism is also hardly new. A couple of decades ago nanotechnology was going to be an imminent breakthrough that would cure practically anything, and even revolutionize matter itself. And genetic engineering has been creating promises since its advent. In the decades of promises there the most we really ended up with was some crops genetically engineered to resist an herbicide, which invasive herbs also naturally grew rapidly resistant to. Cas9? We can wait a few years, but I strongly suspect I'll be able to add it onto the nanotechnology pile of 'just around the corner' revolutionary breakthroughs, but they're just around the corner in the same way that the end of MC Escher's stairwells are also just around the corner.

As a military officer who researches cancer and has lost a number of friends and family to both war and cancer, I think you may misunderstand both the way we live with and treat cancer, and what war is like. They are quite similar: all the outcomes take time off your life, there is often a significant risk to your life, there is liable to be a lot of blood at some point, and most of it is waiting to die while experts who know precious little more than you mutter and make pronouncements. (and I include myself in that definition of 'expert')