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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

25% of people die from cancer. There's big money in finding an effective treatment.

My limited experience in this suggests that the main issue is that techies and biologists don't make friends that often and even when do, they they both tend to glaze out when the other tries to talk shop. One wants to talk about algorithms (the techies) and one wants to talk about classification (the bio people). And we haven't even gotten to the topic of conversation yet.

Another major problem is that medical schools don't require serious math. I genuinely believe the single best way to advance health care would be to make linear algebra a pre-requisite for medical school.

Genuinely curious, how would learning linear algebra help future medical doctors?

They don't understand how to think in higher dimensions, or how that quickly separates the trivial from the near-impossible. Many don't understand deeper algorithmic thinking. Recursion, partial differential equations.

They gather enough information that they can classify a patient into a storyline and they follow that storyline. If someone adds a new complication to the storyline, they adopt that. If the patient lives, they are happy. If the patient dies, they are sad.

Trying to explain to them that we have, today, the tools to concretely rethink all the data about cancer or infectious disease, or inflammatory conditions, or all the above, in innumerable ways, simply escapes them.

You can tell them you're funded and have petabytes of data and they just smile and nod and say "Oh, well, start with something small and build up."

I say this as a board-certified specialist. My colleagues drive me nuts. And the more powerful (read, "senior") they are, the less they understand.

There are many different kinds of cancer. It's very unlikely to find a treatment for all of them.

If cancer were suddenly cured, those people would still die

What's the percentage of non-EOL people that die of cancer?

I don't know, but I've personally known quite a few people who died of cancer decades before their 80's, and only one in his 80's.

They might die in a nicer way. Dying of cancer is not very pleasant compared to falling off a horse when you're 143 and breaking your neck.

I'm assuming 75% of people aren't dying in that way (or aged 98 while making love to their fourteenth wife and losing control of the plane they're flying)

I'm personally more worried about things like dementia

Sure, I'd also rather die from cancer than from Alzheimer's, but "they'll die in a different way" is a poor argument against medical research.

But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...

"Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.

There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined.

(Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine)

Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"

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