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.