Israeli scientists claim to have found cure for cancer | Hacker News Reader

Israeli scientists claim to have found cure for cancer

wfla.com

53 pointsavalex3331 comments

This is obviously quackery.

They made some experiments in mice. Now they claim they have a cure within a year.

(This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of people who know better than I do: https://twitter.com/MDankner/status/1090295041115983872 https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1090283969378054144 )

To support your point, twenty years I heard an oncological researcher say, "If you're a mouse, and you have cancer, we can cure you."

These days we have even more cancer cures for mice. Most of them do little to nothing when used in human beings.

> This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of people who know better than I do

Knee-jerk reactions of Ph.D. students aren't really more convincing than the original article.

I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious quackery".

> I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious quackery".

IMHO science works the other way round.

Skepticism is essential in science. Gut-feelings based on newspaper articles have no place there.

gut feelings have a huge place in discovery science (what these scientists are doing). It can lead you in directions that rational cannot. For example, Kekule's dream of ouroborus: " He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).[14]"

I've been privileged to know a lot of world-class scientists, and many of them have told me their careers and their best ideas came from gut feelings. Of course, they had to apply skepticism to the experimental results of their gut feeling experiments.

Exactly. Gut feeling is another word for intuition. Such background cognition is a great tool in science and has been found in use by a lot of top scientists and thinkers. Training it by broadening your knowledge and then using skepticism and other science tools to focus your thinking is a great way for finding stuff out.

here's your more information http://blogs.cancer.org/drlen/2019/01/29/a-cure-for-cancer-n... from the deputy chief medical officer of the ACS. The statements made in the blog post are completely correct as modern medicine is done. But you didn't need his blog post to know what the scientists did was unreasonable. In science, you have to back every claim with published data.

Note that now the scientists are claiming they can't afford to publish their research. But running a lab to do cancer research costs much more than publishing (even publishing in a top-tier journal is less than $10K, rent on a lab and salaries are more than $10K/MONTH).

The second link was Vinay Prasad. He's not a PhD student, he's one of the most respected cancer researchers alive.

PhD students often hold journal clubs where they evaluate current research (in my phd program in biophysics we covered everything from the publication of the human genome to quantum erasers). I don't think the reactions to these are knee-jerk: based on everything we know about the situation, the claim is unreasonable.

From the actual article ( https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli... ):

"Morad said that so far, the company has concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials. AEBi is on the cusp of beginning a round of clinical trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment available in specific cases."

vs.

"We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer."

Don't those two statements contradict each other?

I'm pretty sure that the researcher didn't come up with the headline, its journalism in the Trump age

Cancer isn't just one thing; it's the general term for a whole bunch of different problems. Saying you have a cure is like saying you have a cure for "virus". Science just doesn't work like that.

Mostly agreed, though from the handwaving in the article it seems that they claim that they can identify and exploit suitable receptors for any of the many cancers.

So, they might be able to tailor a potentially unsafe or deadly hormone (read: poison) to get at cancer. Sounds like chemo v2 to me, not a cure, won't work in all cancers especially later stage which no longer depend on the receptor stimulation.

But there are some generic cures for "virus", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug

Antivirals are not a drug, it's an entire class of drugs.

The point is, a cure for cancer makes no more sense than a cure for sickness.

Original article:

https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli...

I was about to post the same link. Linked article by OP has close to no information, meanwhile original article is easily accessible anyway.

Linked article from the OP: https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israe...

More detail in that, but still nothing more than an interview with the the scientists who claim to have developed the "cure".

Read this a few days ago through reddit. It sounded outlandish - like cryptocurrency ponzi promotion article.

That's why I didn't post it.

It would be ironic if an incredible invention like a cure to cancer went unoticed because everyone thought it was fake

If it works, it won't go unnoticed.

Ideally.

According to fast.ai there's this (very simple) technique to automate optimizing the learning rate parameter for deep neural networks, that went unnoticed for a couple years, because it was discovered by a no-name researcher, while all the big wig researchers were spending tons of manual hours finding the optimal learning rate.

Kudos

I thought Reddit was finding cures for cancer on a periodic basis, is it going to be Hacker News after all?

Submitted 12 times previously.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cancer%20cure&sort=byDate&pref...

Just a PR stunt... nothing to be concerned about. Cancer is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

There were some attempts to reprogram virus to cure cancer but ethical concerns have stopped progress in this path.

Human made viruses can have significantly more impact than planned. If this cure works, I believe that people should be kept in quarentine until clear of the virus.

reddit used to have at least one very confident claim of a full cure for cancer make it to the front page per week, which we would then never hear from again if course. I fear the same will be the case here

Of course it sounds too good to be true, however I read the linked original article, which provides much more detail and - everything they say sounds plausible and coherent and most important is novel, they admit several years away, let’s hope they have discovered a genuine breakthrough. Medicine is very short on discoveries that actually make much difference to human health ie hygiene, vaccines, anti-biotics, anti-virals(more limited) - there has not been one for quite a long time, so the optimist in me says, maybe this is another - stem cell and telomerase based therapies also seem to me to be on the cusp of providing real benefits in dealing with the worst disease of all - aging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com