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Comment by jroseattle | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the sentiment, maybe one day we can hope to "hack" cancer. Once we can deconstruct something, we can control it, destroy it, whatever.

RIP Mitch Hill. Seattle, represent.

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Unlikely, because cancer is not one thing but many. Each kind of cancer behaves differently, is susceptible to different treatments. And I once read an article about a genetic analysis that found dozens of completely different strains of cells in a single tumor.

http://www.esquire.com/features/patient-zero-1213 gives a pretty good feel for the challenges in treating cancer.

There's lots of different types of diseases. That says nothing about the odds of (at some point) coming up with a treatment for any one of them

The point is: cancer is really a whole family of diseases, and it's really unlikely that a single treatment will work on all of them.

That's pretty well known at this point.

That doesn't mean the problem(s) can't be solved. Early detection, and identifying exactly what type of cancer a person has would have a lot of value, for example.

nobody said anything about a single treatment.

Details notwithstanding, I still want to hack it -- to pieces.

> maybe one day we can hope to "hack" cancer

Not in the way you are meaning, but we already have.

As well as virus call and bacteria we have tested using altered cancer cells as a delivery mechanism for medication (particularly against other cancer cells). I'm pretty sure there have been no human trials of anything like this yet though.

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