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Comment by adamwong246 | Hacker News Reader

Dying of cancer is a good thing- it means you didn't die in childbirth or from malaria or diabetes. Cancer is a really big name for a lot of the tough diseases we don't yet have a cure for. This "tidal wave" is simply mortal humans living long enough that they start breaking on a molecular level. That may someday change but living long enough to die from cancer is, sadly, the grand prize in life. Not much of a prize but still better than the alternative.

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The map in the article makes it look like the US and Europe are having a cancer epidemic, while the rest of the world has much lower numbers. What seem more likely is the 'west' is having a cancer detection epidemic. Just because cancer is detected doesn't mean that it is going to kill you. You could easily die from a heart attack before the cancer had significant negative effects, for example.

>> "Dying of cancer is a good thing- it means you didn't die in childbirth or from malaria or diabetes. That may change but living long enough to die from cancer is, sadly, the grand prize in life."

I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer. Not to mention the types of cancer that are more common in younger people (e.g. testicular cancer). In the past living long enough to bear children may have been considered a good thing - you didn't die from an infection we had no cure for. The people who die from the disease probably don't see it the same way and I doubt you would either. Even though I understand your premise if I got cancer even in my 90's I wouldn't be thinking: "Wow, look how long I lived", I'd be thinking, "Shit, I have cancer".

> I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer.

In the USA, 3X as many children die of car crashes than cancer, and solving car crashes is way easier than solving cancer. Want to save just as many kids as you would by curing cancer? Stop driving so fast.

http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

http://www.childdeathreview.org/nationalchildmortalitydata.h...

My point was that young people also die of cancer - it's not just something that comes with old age.

Hopefully more computer assisted driving will make a big difference to road traffic deaths.

Ah, but cancer is always the same thing, body cells going amok. The reasons are manifold and a lot of research is going on there, but the result is, broadly speaking, the same. (Of course you get different kinds of tumors..) It's hard to see how it can ever be eradicated for good since it's kind of part of the system and does not neccessarily have external causes (though in most cases is does).

And then there are other diseases we have no cure for yet, which are not cancer, such as Alzheimers and aids. We can eradicate those, I believe.

I don't really think it can be fixed either. Trying to cure all cancers is like trying to engineer a car that never, ever breaks for all eternity. Even if you left this hypothetical perfect sports car in the garage, the belts and tires and tubes would start to degrade eventually.

Better to try to replace each part as it breaks with an upgrade! That's my immortality plan- when my hearing breaks, get an implant. When the hip goes out, in goes a titanium one. You mind starts slipping? We're going to need some sort of prosthetic neurons, I'm thinking carbon nanotubes you inject into you spinal fluid and which self-assemble inside the brain. Eventually, enough meat has been replaced with tech that my mind can make the complete jump to software and at which point I shed this frail human form and proceed to explore the universe via self-replicating probes... Well, that's the plan anyways.

But either way, to beat cancer, you going to need to fundamentally redesign the human form.

ps (Elon Musk, if you are reading this, please contact me. I'm really don't want to die and I'm willing to act as a guinea pig towards that end)

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of biology.

You think that you have organs, but really, you have cells. When those cells break in a particular way, cancer results. 99.999% of those cancers are terminated. The rest can kill.

Preventing cancer is a matter of adding 9s to that statistic until death is implausible. Then, we run up against other senescence factors: our cells can only divide so many times, garbage accumulates that can't be purged, etc.

It's plausible to imagine a world where we no longer die of cancer, adding 10-20 years to the average lifespan. People will start to die of obscure diseases caused by genes no longer being present in their DNA.

So we work on fixing that. It's difficult, of course.

I want to add that we actually get cancer all the time (like, every day), but our bodies kill it successfully. That's why people with AIDS or bad nutrition get more cancer: they are not able to fight it anymore.

Cancer = numerou8s diseases and I wish they never just lumped them all into one category.

SAD THING another knock against pediatric cancer. Pediatric cancer get's less then 4% of Federal Funding and American Cancer Society gives less then 1% toward it. Now these numbers will be used to funnel more money away from finding a cure for neglected research. Not one new chemotherapy drug for pediatric cancer in 24 years!!!!

What? I did a quick google search and Arranon was approved for pediatric cancer last July.

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/druginfo/fda-nelarabine

Also, if you looked up the number of pediatric cancer cases as a total of all cancer cases, the 4% makes sense. I dug the numbers up a while ago, but you can find them with a quick google search.

Having seen what cancer does to a loved one before killing you, I'd rather be shot or die just about any other quick way.

Is it the cancer? Or the treatment? I've lost several loved ones to cancer, and I'm not saying cancer is an easy way to go, but intensive chemotherapy that takes all the energy out of a person, and only prolongs someone's life by one agonizing painful year, seems worse to me than just letting the cancer consume you.

Of course you have no way of knowing ahead of time whether or not the treatments will work... If you have most of your life ahead of you, fight the cancer. But if I get cancer at 75 (which I very well may, if genetics play a role in these things), I'm considering choosing to forgo treatment in order to save everyone pain, time, and money. I just don't think it would be worth living like deathly sick person for potentially years, only to die at 82 of something else.

In my aunt's case, it was the cancer.

The radiation and chemo helped my aunt live about 10 years longer than she would have if left untreated. It was totally worth it.

Plus, the drugs at the hospital helped ease the pain when she passed.

Seen by somebody who got sick in his 20s, this post of yours is so uneducated to be offensive.

Young people, even children, certainly get cancer, but an individual's odds of getting cancer go up the longer they live. The article even states:

    "The global cancer burden is increasing and quite markedly, due predominately to the ageing of the populations and population growth."

In other words, there are more people, and they're living longer. Therefore, more people are getting cancer. You can try to look at this as good news. We've (mostly) stamped out diseases like polio, leprosy, and tuberculosis. Now we have to worry about cancer, and unfortunately that's not an easy one to tackle (not that the other ones were either though).

AdamWong, you are exactly right!

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