If he hadn't tried to self-treat his cancer with acupuncture, fruit juice and herbs, he'd probably be around now to do that. The man was clearly a lucky idiot, and shouldn't be revered, but used as a cautionary tale of unbridled arrogance.
"Probably", he'd not be around today. Even with his money, it'd be improbable.
If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.
Not moving goalposts, but on another note:
He refused regular treatment for 9 months, for an allegedly slow-growing type of cancer?
That still doesn't sound that crazy, especially given he lived another 8 years.
Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinre.2018.08....
Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
He had an overwhelming presence in SF until the New Wave of the 1960s
Many universities had depts to study “parapsychology.” The end of that era is the basis for the opening of Ghostbusters. I’m using popular media as shorthand for how wide-spread these ideas were, but military and intelligence operations seriously studied this stuff too, and in many countries, not just the U.S.
This is the way science goes; people can only work with what is known at the time. Newton was doing alchemy while inventing the basis for modern physics. It’s tempting to look back and condemn people by the standards of what we know today, which is based on additional evidence and theory developed over decades or centuries since. But I think it inhibits understanding of how such knowledge is created over time.
His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.
I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.