By 2012, scientists will have announced a cure for breast cancer (2006)
longbets.org
longbets.org
And, we have generics to prevent HIV infection, and we have promising new mRNA therapies, that were in development (with woefully little funding!) at U Penn, when this bet was being placed!
Perhaps this is unwarranted optimism in the specific case, but as a broader expression of hope in future scientific progress, the long bet wins.
Scientific progress has and will always win. However, it's almost impossible to predict which dimension/aspect of the scientific progress will accelerate. mRNA is a prime example of it.
I wish I could share this optimism, but one thing we've seen in the last year is that people will put themselves and others at risk as part of tribal signaling: "humans are motivated reasoners who alter their thinking, feeling, and behaving when thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways might upset their peers."[0]
Maybe I'm reading your statement in a different way than you intend it. The science itself is good, but if society isn't leveraging that knowledge for our own betterment, is science winning?
[0] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2020/07/31/yanss-185-why-the-re...
I put others at risk every time I drive my car. In theory I could eliminate that risk by walking everywhere, but I'm unwilling to do so.
That's not at all what I said. What I said was "people will put themselves and others at risk as part of tribal signaling".
There's risk everywhere, but adding risk as a way to signal that you're in this group and not in that group is - at least in the case of masks - contrary to scientific progress.
Edit: also there is a hormone called DES that was used in the past (a hormone like estrogen) that if used by mom during pregnancy increased offspring risk of cervical cancer.
Can we fix that last bit with CRISPR?
That second problem is finding those very rare people with the inherited risk of HPV negative cervical cancer before it becomes a problem, which would require us to a point where we have full genetic screening of the entire population as a standard thing (not to mention being sure we know which genes are for sure high risk for HPV negative adenocarcinoma of the cervix, which I don't think we have a clear picture yet).
Fun fact, the Pfizer corona vaccine was developed by Turkish-German women who has been working on developing a solution on fighting cancer with basically an mRNA vaccine. She pivoted to tackling corona last year but is looking to get back to tackling cancer. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-v...
2012 was maybe a bit optimistic but the last year has shown we can get results in under 12 months if the stakes are high enough.
- Lead time bias. If you discover cancers early and patients survive more, is it because you're treating better or because you discovered (and started counting) earlier?
- False positives and negatives. All tests will have them, and for low prevalence cancers it might mean that testing doesn't give too much information and just increases load on healthcare systems and puts patients through unnecessary tests and procedures.
- Indolent diseases. Extensive testing might discover tumors that don't have symptoms and are not life-threatening, so you might treat people (with the risks associated) that didn't need to be treated.
And that's if the tests themselves can be developed. Apparently there are a lot of types of cancer, each with different markers, behaviors, affecting different cells. It doesn't seem likely that a single test will be able to catch cancer in general.
Not all cancers grow fast. I've been told (read I'm not enough of an expert to evaluate the claim though it seems reasonable) there are some cancers that basically everybody has, but they grow so slowly that science won't worry about them until lifespans reach 150.
I don't see any other way we can achieve life extention.
Wow, did not know this part! Is this common knowledge? If so, how is "a while" defined? How do we know which ones to just ignore?
There are other cases of cancer going into remission after doctors gave up on any treatment working.
Now combine that with decreasing DNA sequencing costs, it should put us on a path where the feasibility of cancer sequencing as a standard method of _exact_ identification and mRNA treatments targeting those identified exactly becomes standard fare within a few years (even if there probably is a bunch of cancerous mutations the number should be somewhat restricted considering much of the risks are hereditary).
We have a vaccine to prevent it, not a cure for it.
Then... I want to say that they got really boring for a while as various people were using it to pitch their own business. I recall one that was about shipping fresh water somewhere via long plastic tubes on the ocean... and the predictor had a company that he was trying to get funding for to ship water on the ocean via large plastic tubes.
This bet falls into the same category of boring, pitching a product (a particular drug).
Unfortunately, Long Bets has moved from interesting wagers about the future of people and trying to get people to think about time scales beyond the next few years to something longer - as part of the Long Now foundation ( https://longnow.org ).
Fiji?
> Within two years, at least two or more waterbags, connected by the world's strongest zipper into a train, carrying total of at least one and one half million gallons of fresh water, will be successfully towed from Washington State, under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay, and then south to Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles. ...
with the justification:
> Because the team I have assembled over the past sixteen years of pursuing this goal will make this happen. ...
That's not a bet... that's marketing.
Look at 176 for another bit of marketing.
Scroll through them and you'll find something that looks more like an obscure, unmoderated blog (with comments).
People have had unrealistic dreams to cure cancer at least since Nixon. It isn't really one disease so it is a safe bet that 'cancer' will endure even if many subtypes were eliminated.
If there is any place where people use science and technology as a religion it is the treatment of deadly diseases. People are always going to have psychological needs that they'll try to address by putting up pink ribbons on everything.
You're still right, of course, since there are still (probably, haven't checked) multiple different kinds of breast cancer, and also because no cancer is curable if it has spread wide enough.
Testicular cancer nowadays has cure rates of 90 to 95 percent or so (close to 100% for certain types, above 80% for others), thanks to chemotherapy that happens to be very effective against those kinds of tumours. So it's not an entirely unrealistic idea that you could find a cure that works in a large majority of cases if you limit yourself to something narrower than "cancer".
Of course how easy or difficult or realistic it is to find that kind of a cure even for a more limited range of cancers still depends on the type of cancer and whatever other factors there are, because, well, it is a bunch of rather different disease.
And so on. It was well known when it started. It got boring as people used it to pitch business plans and drugs by making poorly thought out "predictions" about them.
I hate this...yet am scared it's true.
Another notion I hate and are am afraid is true is that: even if corporations were prepared to cure cancer and take the hit, the state would be terrified of increased longevity, at least I think so.
Retirement age people are to the state, probably, what post-reproductive organisms are to evolution: dead weight that they can't "afford" to care about.
In these areas I think the incentives might be wrong, but we can probably too better somehow. No idea how that can be corrected tho... :'(
Quick examples include:
* Hepatitis C - can now be cured in ~95% of cases. When the various drugs were released, they made many billions for the manufacturers, as the economic case for their use was clear.
* previously-untreated DLBCL (a type of lymphoma) - can be cured in ~2/3rds of patients, and many trials are ongoing (and have been run previously) to try to push this percentage higher. A treatment adding extra cures would be valued highly.
If you're using that conspiracy theory phrase I think either you're verging a little too much into below the belt territory there or maybe you doubt the point you're making so you are compensating for it with this dirty psychological trick. I'm not saying that's how it is for you that's just how it comes across for me.
But the list price is $419 000.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/bristol-myers-bluebir...
Consider a disease has an effective daily pill treatment where each pill costs $.50 to make. Someone comes along with a single pill that costs $1000 to make but cures you. The cure developers have just spent a lot of money on R&D and need to make a profit on the administration of the cure, so they need to price it significantly over their production costs. The established treatment on the other hand has a war chest and can recoup short term losses in the long run, so they can afford to drop their prices or even give it away for free for a limited time. Perhaps some segment of the population will pay a hefty premium just for not having to deal with the hassle of treatment, but most people don't have thousands to spend on such a luxury and will stick with the option they can afford right now, even though it will wind up costing more over the course of their lifetime.
They can't keep your arm in a cast because fixing it with an operation is top expansive.
The fact is that $1000 is not the cost of producing the pill, that is the amount they can charge for the pill while still getting people to pay for it. When there is no competition, and people would die without it, prices get very high very quickly. There is an extremely large barrier to entry for new medicines, and pharmaceutical companies are structured to recoup the massive development costs by charging large sums for inexpensive to produce goods that they have essentially a monopoly over. If it costs billions of dollars to develop a cure, that cure is going to have to be expensive, but a cure administered repeatedly can amortize those costs over many low-cost doses, while a one-time cure can't. Insurance companies are all about spreading costs over time - paying out large sums to large numbers of people all at once is a lot more problematic than smaller, predictable payouts over a longer period of time. It is in their best interest as well for you to manage the disease.
It would be good to see some actual economists weigh in on this.
Cancer meds are really expensive, a four month cycle in myeloma ( where most of the time 2/3/4 drugs are combined) can cost more than 250k. Revlimid, a maintainance drug often given for years can cost 20k a month (in India it's $150 a month).
First, when they cure a disease we don't sudenly become immortal, it improves our life quality and expectancy and new diseases become more prevalent at a later stage, so they don't lose their jobs.
Second, even if slowing down research could effectively allow them to benefit longer from existing cures, generally you have competitors and inertia tends to not work well in adversarial conditions.
I don't think that's just because of process. I think some of it is there's profit to me made by artificially holding back innovation because then you can stretch it out over the maximum amount of time through which you can extract value from it.
Just like suppressing advanced technologies. in the public example consider like apple they must have super advanced devices that they're working on and we're not going to see them for a while because why would they bring out that generation now when they can still make a good profit from their existing product lines long into the future.
As for the motivation to not pursue a profitable cure because you'd rather make more money from treatments, this isn't really the options you get to choose from. The real game they play is to choose either to find and sell the cure if one exists, or to sit back and watch the just-as-smart competition find and sell that cure instead of them. Their profitable treatment loses out either way.
Cancer affects many many people who are healthy otherwise and would have had many more productive years. It isn't just a disease of old age. Especially breast cancer. Either way, elderly folks are the most prolific voters, so there's the incentive situation for the govt.
Others have provided nice arguments as to why this isn't necessarily so, but allow me to add one more that is (I hope) more likely to appeal to a cynic.
This is one area where the corporate focus on short-term profits is actually working to the long-term benefit of humans. While it would be more profitable in the long run to sit on a cure and continue to sell therapeutics indefinitely, what CEO could resist the stock-boosting effect of a cure for a major disease? What a time to exercise your options! Long-term profitability is a problem for the next guy.
There's the reason to point out (why pass the opportunity of a huge short term profit?) but also for these types of diseases there's bound to be a high ranking officer within the company who either directly suffers from the illness or has a close family member who does. I doubt that they'd let themselves or their wives die for the sake of getting a nice +3% to benefits ten years down the line.
Cancer is not contagious, and something that is treated in the individual case by curing it. The “cure for cancer” would thus simply be a more effective treatment than what is available now.
This is fundamentally different from h.i.v. infections, where a patient is a lifelong client, and a cure would amount to a type of treatment that would indeed completely cure the patient of the infection, and thus terminate the client.
Cancer research is it's own entrenched entity with horrible incentives that promote stagnation and often imbecilic levels of hubris that are at it's core shielded by the general public's ignorance of biological science as well as their nearly child-like level of fantasy of what was possible back then.
As biologists we all had hopes and dreams of pursuing these seemingly insurmountable feats to make a dent in the problem, but as we went through the meat grinders of undergrad, and then the soul-crushing reality of the 'Industry' and its machinations and internal politics from the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex on which it's built on compounded with tons of debt and lowering qualities and standards of living it's no surprise so many biologists ended up quitting life sciences and going into tech--HN revealed to me many things, but also just how common that route is.
My short and sweet: Cancer is inevitable of any multi-celled organism on a long enough timeline and preventative health measures and healthy lifestyles are worth more than anything any Corp will ever sell you--they're unpopular because they require personal effort.
Eating better, sleeping more, and exercising are better alternatives but rquire effort and possible loss of economic compensation, but if do them and you know that while you are not immune to any malady you are better off than most who are betting on some miracle cure to solve all the health problems they have amassed hoping for a silver bullet.
I'm optimistic about the advances the 21st Century will usher in biology, I think the 21st century will be defined by biology in fact, but it's not something that will be egalitarian nor will it be promoted to most who haven't already have made efforts to take their health serious long ago. Most people don't even know about stem cell therapy besides what a influencer Joe Rogan told them, which is... something but still not even scratching the surface.
Much of the rhetoric that surrounds breast and prostate cancer irks me as though it be more rooted in identity politics than medicine. — I don't think such a specific claim would easily be made about, say, colon cancer or leukæmia.
That’s why there probably won’t be a universal “cure for cancer”.
Breast or prostate cancer are the most common cancers in women and men respectively. No matter what you identify as, if you have either breast or prostate tissue, there’s a real risk to most people. That’s why we hear about it more. We don’t hear as much about mesothelioma because it’s rarer.
I don’t think it has anything to do with identity politics and everything to do with the medicine.
For almost all cancers, there are common treatment options like surgery. External beam radiation can very often be used if the area is targetable. Internal radiation works far less often, but there are some specifics that make some cancers unique there, like Thyroid cells that are susceptible to radioactive iodine. Chemotherapy with cell-division-inhibiting drugs also works, but there differences really start to show, because the various cancer cells have different division rates and susceptibilities to certain inhibitors, making some chemo drug better or worse than another.
And then there are some cancers, where very specific treatments may be available, like e.g. antibodies that target those specific cancer cells since they have unique surface features that can be targeted. The more targeted the method the better, since you will have less collateral damage and can use a higher, more potent dose.
So superficially, there might seem to be three main options, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. But even those very common options can have vast differences that aren't always obvious to the layman who just gets to hear about the rough categories of treatments.
But Gleevec doesn't work on prostate or breast cancer.
Cancers happen when mutations in a cell cause it to proliferate uncontrollably; the genetic circuits that need to be activated differ by cell type. For instance, prostate cancer can be treated with anti-androgens, since testosterone is required for prostate cells to reproduce. The cancer can evolve to resist anti-androgen therapy by mutating the androgen receptor so it's always stuck on. It's all circuits, and all the circuits are different.
Yet most cancer treatment at the moment is not so specific. The exact same drugs are used to treat many different forms of cancer[1]; lukæmia is indeed treated with the same drugs as breast cancer is.
> Breast or prostate cancer are the most common cancers in women and men respectively.
The most common form of cancer is lung cancer[2], and while breast cancer takes a second place, prostate cancer is fairly low down the list at 5. Furthermore, in terms of lethality, both take a rather strong backseat to many other forms[3]
> I don’t think it has anything to do with identity politics and everything to do with the medicine.
I see no evidence for your claim that breast cancer is so fundamentally different and the link I posted indicates that the same treatments are very much used for different locations of cancer.
- [1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000910.htm - [2] https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/worldwide-c... - [3] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
The drugs might still be more effective against one type of cancer than against another for whatever reasons. I'm not knowledgeable of those reasons, but a bit of research might tell something about them.
Chemotherapy drugs have hiked cure rates for testicular cancer to somewhere around 90%. I think I've read that it was somewhere around 50% before the discovery of those drugs in the 1960's or 1970's. The same combinations of drugs (or some of the same drugs combined with something else) are also used for other kinds of cancer, such as ovarian or cervical cancer if my memory serves. Yet those drugs or drug combinations still aren't quite as effective against those other types of cancer as they are against testicular cancer. That's probably just a matter of them happening to work well against some specific kinds of neoplasms, not a matter of what anybody wants them to work against.
You may be right that some types of cancer get more attention because they primarily affect intimate organs, and thus provoke stronger emotions. However, for example the chemotherapy that's still used for testicular cancer was discovered decades ago, and probably has nothing to do with any kind of identity politics. TC is also rare enough that it's probably off most people's radars, and the reason it's got a ~90% cure rate is probably just that a treatment was discovered that happens to work against it.
While emotional reasons may certainly direct the general interest towards particular kinds of cancer, I disagree with your general notion that a cure for a particular kind of cancer would be for some reason less likely than a general one. On the contrary, finding a specific drug (or having a general drug work better against one or a few types of cancer than others) would be much more likely than a cure-all. There's even an example of the former, and it's not because of present-day identity politics.
Then allow me to introduce you to the world of personalized cancer vaccines, that can even be targeted to a specific cancer of a specific patient. Here are some readings to get you started:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-020-00460-2
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064988/
- http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aar7112
All the literature speaks of that this technique can be used to treat cancer in general, even though the treatment's nature itself relies on the specific properties of specific cancer cells as to not be as destructive as most treatments that exist today.
These vaccines are based on neoantigens, which, quoting the abstract of one of those articles, "are highly specific to tumours of individual patients". The technique is generally applicable to several types of cancer, but the cure will be specific to only one type.
It still won't lead to developing a cure for only one type of cancer.
I did not attack identity politics on frequency of occurrence, but on medical inaccuracy. — absent any attack on the accuracy of my arguments, yours is essentially an argument of. “These days, I'm seeing attacks on inaccuracy brought up more than inaccuracy.”.
I may certainly hope that you see such.
It's like saying: White People do X - not only not ALL, not often not even more than one. "White People" is a label that ignores individuals and no two are the same. Sometimes similar but never the same.
Each type of cancer is as unique as each human is genetically and behaviorally. So when you "get cancer" it's not unusual for the genetic profile and identity to change as much as human genetics changes in a dozen generations for the same reasons that bacteria can evolve super quickly. Most cancer recurrences are a genetic drift that takes over "the cancer" from the prior species that has been put into remission.
This is why cancer treatments now are increasingly including full DNA sequencing to figure out exactly what sub-sub-species it is to tailor to known genetic weaknesses and treatment strengths. Honestly it's a complexity explosion rather than any type of "victory". It's proven that there never will be a victory with some type of singular "magic bullet".
And in the end, we will all die. No "transhumanism" is NEVER going to change that or save the day. It's childish and reality ignoring to believe it will.
We are actually trading between cancer and lifespan - at a molecular level. There's a scientific paper about this from maybe 10 years ago I can't find easily but that's the actual trade-off of living at all. All living things have the same trade-off.
In 1993 Prof. Dr. Somlyai has discovered that cancer cells cannot tolerate low-deuterium environments (as low as 100 ppm). There is solid science behind. He and his workmate, Prof. Dr. Boros even buy the publication fee for their own scientific papers to make them available to the general public because they are open to recieve scientific criticism. The idea of deuterium depletion manifested in a therapy using deuterium depleted water, which is drank regularly or injected directly into tumors. It has been approved for animals and being used in therapy since 15 years with great success. The human experiments have succeeded to demonstrate that mentioned water significantly improves acute survival rate, and survival rate is significantly better after 1 year of treatment.
The authorities have declined to approve its use in humans because there were no significant improvement in survival rate after 3 years of treatment. So "we dont have a cure for cancer".
Life, since eucaryotic cells have appeared, thrive to deplete deuterium levels inside mitochondria because deuterium kills atpase enzyme, which produces the energy for the whole body. One method of doing this is to keep procaryote cells and fungi in the gut, which in turn tend to concentrate deuterium, which is required for their genes to multiply. Feces is therefore richer in deuterium, getting the body levels lower.
Ocean deuterium level is 155. When the water evaporizes, the steam has 2.5% - 4% less deuterium as the water. The cloud then moves around, and rains the deuterium-richer water first, leaving the deuterium depleted rain for the end. When clouds form around the equator, and they quickly fall in the form of summer thunderstorms, they tend to be higher in deuterium. But if the clouds form, move around through the poles, then back to 45 degrees latitude, they can reach the 130 ppm, which is tremenduosly good for mitochondria. We know that cancer is less prevalent as we go closer to poles.
The consequence of mitochondria having low deuterium levels is that they produce citric acid with low deuterium content, which later turns into fat. That's why lard has 118 ppm deuterium in it, which generally means that eating a ketogenic diet of such fats (and drinking as little water as needed) is super efficient in depleting deuterium in the body. It takes 2-3 months to reach the equilibrium of deuterium levels after a change in diet/lifestyle. The Wartburg-effect might be a consequence of this.
ppm is parts per million, which labels how many deuterium isotopes are present for 1000000 hydrogen atoms. So oceans have roughly one deuterium-containing water molecule every 6600 water molecules.
The above is basically what I understood researching the topic, please google Somlyai and Boros for more.
I agree the website is junk, but the kinetic isotope effect is well-known in chemistry, so this statement is false.
If you are claiming they are identical chemically, I think it's you who should come up with Strong Evidence.
The common sense dictates that if a particule is twice as heavy, it COULD have different properties, which can be empirically tested, in fact WAS tested. (see links above)
There are differences in the chemical behaviour of deuterium, but those are only minimal.
Deuterium depleted water is produced by distilling water multiple times, which is extremely energy heavy operation. That's why a bottle of 1.5L 105ppm DDwater costs around $4. It is still extremely cheap if you compare to the cost of other oncology treatments.
There are minimal differences in the chemical behaviour. The very first scientific paper in the publication list shows the effects of that minimal difference. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/107327482199965... The results of deuterium depletion is what you see on Page 6: Decreased proliferation of cancer cells. In vitro studies were followed by animal experiments, which I mentioned above.
The human experiments were conducted on 22 persons. 2 of DDW consumers died, 9 in the placebo group died. This, as I see, doesn't rule out the possibility of an extremely efficient drug for cancer.
These are all backed by strong evidence, see here: https://hyd.hu/en/publications/
Please find the strong evidence here: https://hyd.hu/en/publications/
I don't know more details about it, but surely he can answer your question or you can find the answer in sciencedirect or whatever. I'm not familiar with the science bureaucracy machine, sorry.
Seems woefully inefficient to tackle ten thousand independent fatal ailments - and fund each effort separately - when we could be working on abandoning this frail form entirely.
These individuals are going to die of some ailment within a few decades regardless of whether breast cancer is cured. Consciousness upload is the only thing that enables a real difference for humanity.