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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

    The Cell Chemical Biology study entitled “Small Molecule Targeting of Transcription-Replication Conflict for Selective Chemotherapy” was supported by the Department of Defense

Interesting that the DOD supports this kind of research.

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DoD funds the VA, and cancer is a vast concern and expense for them. Good use of funds IMO.

I wish the best and fastest possible success to this very promising research. I wish it would come sooner for my family.

You would be surprised. The DoD supports a really wide range of research, from biomedical to materials, energy, and computer science. After all, everything can be used to "defend" against an adversary.

It is one of the things that the US is still doing right. Lots of money is poured into basic research. Not all of them are used to build tanks and warships.

Yeah, my first programming gig was doing research for an open source DoD compilers project (ROSE) run by the DOE at LLNL

Congress directs the military to fund research for a variety of medical conditions that impact both currently serving and retired military personnel: https://cdmrp.health.mil/researchprograms

Seems bizarre though, no? Why not do this through the NIH or similar group with the deep expertise in this field?

Because the US military has a 243 year history of providing benefits for its war wounded and disabled.

As for "deep expertise" - my father worked for NIH, the VA and a few universities doing basic medical research for about three decades. Usually multiple of those at the same time, sometimes on the same project.

Providing benefits and developing new treatments seem to differ though, don’t they?

Regarding your father, what was the benefit to him as a researcher to have all of these different groups to work for? Seems like there would be more waste (more fixed overhead of administrators) and bureaucracy.

> Providing benefits and developing new treatments seem to differ though, don’t they?

Not at all- many of the health conditions experienced by veterans are service-related, and no private funding is going to fund the basic research. Some of the research is also related to actively serving soldiers. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, some of my dad's research was related to keeping soldiers fighting in desert climates hydrated. I also did some work in a VA lab in high school which was researching new prosthetics technologies for victims of IED bombings, which did not leave enough of the persons's limb remaining for existing prosthetic designs to attach to.

> Regarding your father, what was the benefit to him as a researcher to have all of these different groups to work for?

More opportunities for funding! Federal grants are very competitive.

> Seems like there would be more waste (more fixed overhead of administrators) and bureaucracy.

Standard operating procedure when the US government's money is involved.

This research may be funded as part of the US "Cancer Moonshot" program started in 2016 [1]. VA hospitals serve millions of patients every year.

[1] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...

Googling "was supported by the Department of Defense" give many interesting results.

Including Google. (Well, the CIA, if not the DoD.)

This is a good point. Few people are brave enough to search for sentence fragments when they read articles online

Between the carcinogens in the water at bases and the fumes from plastic in burn pits, it's not that surprising they'd want to cure cancer. Anyways it's a program administered by the DoD.

You gotta get creative when you have a trillion to dispense of every year.

This is the "Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs".

Directed by congress, run by DoD, doing cancer researches.

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