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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Interesting discussion. At around 7 minutes in, he postulates that maybe we've already cured 20% of cancers. The problem is that we have cures that fail clinical trials because cancer is so varied and not generic enough to have one cure. One drug might only work in 10% of people while another cure might cure another 10%, and so on.

These drugs all fail clinical trails and are lost.

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"One drug might only work in 10% of people while another cure might cure another 10%, and so on."... I believe this, to some degree. But I don't think it's that much. A lot of drugs get killed because of side effects, poor bioavailibility, unexpected responses, interference with other drugs that are common or necessary in the cohort of cancer patients, etc. Those things are much harder to predict. It is embarassingly easy to find compounds that kill cancer cells in vitro.

However, this:

"Cancer results from finite genomic mutations that biotechnology can easily list."

Well the first part is true. The second part, not so much.

Not even sure that the number of ways that a genome can be mutated is even finite. Genomes can be mutated not just by the substitution of single base pairs, but also by introducing copies, through deletions, translocations and insertions.

There is even the phenomenon known as Chromothripsis [1], which has the entire genome smashed into thousands or millions of pieces and then randomly put back together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromothripsis

Pedantically, it would have to be finite, because there is a size limit. Cancer couldn't transform your genome into a piece of DNA the size of the sun.

Just to out-pedant you, the size of the sun is still quite finite, most (all?) things are.

Perhaps colloquially, finite here is (not un-like literally) a metaphor, in this case for not-unfathomably-large, or more precisely, measurable.

It's not because it's finite that the number of combinations possible is limited. Just like for passwords, the more bits involved, the more possibilities you get, and a DNA or RNA is a molecular version of a very, very long password. So "finite" is a very poor way to describe the complexity.

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