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Really quite a huge number of people are asking that question already. And a massively disproportionate amount of science funding goes towards cancer research. Far more people in the world die of communicable and vector-borne diseases or illness related to malnourishment. These issues get much less research attention and funding because so many people in the western world are focussed on cancer. So while my heart goes out to the OP, and I hope his treatment is successful and his family are well provided for, I really don't think what we need is more people to focus on cancer. Lets focus on saving as many lives as possible.

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You are right for the wrong reason. The problem with cancer research is that we are trying to solve an unsolvable problem, wasting disproportionate amounts of money. In some sense, cancer is a symptom of a body gone havoc. Research should be targeted upstream, to really tackle the root cause. It is like trying to fix a hardware issue by patching software. Yes, you can get some results by implementing better error correction, retrying I/O operations, etc, but at the end, you just need to change the fucking RAM module.

BTW, same thing with researching "illness related to malnourishment": Avoid malnourishment and then, there is no need to cure anything.

Youre 100% right and im not a food scientist, but i strongly feel the increase on cancer in humans can be attributed to the largely corn based diet humans are fed.. and the other terrible food items were fed by the powers that be.

Everything is made with corn or corn byproducts and its not healthy at all.. not only that were feeding it to all our animals.. its a bad bad situation how our food supply is treated, and the more we push "lab grown food" the worse its going to get.

The rise in cancer incidence is mostly due to people living longer; advancing age is the biggest risk factor for most cancers.

Anyway there are many other risk factors, and evidence for corn itself being one is scant. Alcohol intake, smoking, red meat consumption, lack of dietary fibre, high salt levels in one's diet and obesity are much more concerning, given the correlative evidence.

either way, humans weren't made to eat a largely corn based diet nor were animals. Most of the food in grocery stores is just corn remade. It's extremely unhealthy food.

You can taste the difference in a cow that's been fed a corn diet and a cow thats been grass fed. Problem is if you see those cattle lots they have so many head of beef(far to many for the acreage) it's just dirt. Then it's dipped in a bath of ecoli killing shit, and squished up with a bajillion other cows.. it's disgusting. I'll stick to raising my own food.

If you want to invest in anything, buy land.

Is this overindulgence in corn a USA thing? I'm not overly familiar with your foodstuffs.

> im not a food scientist, but i strongly feel

If science has shown anything, it's that this is the wrong way to think. Leave the answers to those who do the science, feelings are a terrible way to come to conclusions. Blaming corn based on your feelings is irrational and very likely completely wrong.

I suspect the "increase in cancer" is noticeable because we're generally not being knocked over by something else first. I believe there is an interesting relationship between prevalence of heart disease and cancer over time (one rises as the other falls).

It's not a waste of money. Therapies for certain cancers do get developed and, in conducting such research, we learn a great deal more about cell biology.

Yes, the trigger for carcinogenic mutations is mostly environmental influence - some of which can be controlled and some of which can't - but that's no reason to cease funding research into the actual cellular mechanisms of cancer.

Fair enough, but I see cell biology advances as a by-product of cancer research as in "how does this cancerous cell react to this candidate drug ?" instead of "why does a healthy cell go havoc ? Why is the immune system unable to detect and destroy a cell gone havoc ?"

I see what you're saying but it's not really just a by-product, it's an integral part of the research. Both the "why" and the "how" are needed, especially when looking at rational drug design to have specific targets to screen for.

Reminded me of this article about Cancer Research and how we may still have a long way to go.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/world...

Yeah, the fact that millions of people still die of diseases we can treat, and are often even trivially preventable, is a far bigger social tragedy than there being some diseases we cannot cure yet.

Life sucks sometimes, but there's so much more we could be doing to make it suck a lot less for a lot of people.

It's the other way around, actually. HIV gets a massively disproportionate amount of funds. Cancer gets disproportionately little.

Also, as we are eliminating competing risks, cancer is emerging as a huge source of death in developing economies.

That's true only in the specific case of HIV in the USA - the funding in the USA for cancer vs HIV is about right for the global number of deaths from those diseases. Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is.

For other diseases - malaria, dengue, hepatitis, typhoid etc., not to mention malnutrition - global spending is massively disporportionate in favour of cancer.

>Especially if you consider that cancer is showing no sign of being a curable problem, while HIV is.

"We haven't found a solution to this problem" is possibly the worst reason I've ever heard to cut back on research.

I'm not suggesting cutting back on research, but distributing the research budget effectively. We need some long-term research into cancer cures, but not at the cost of the lives of people who can be saved today or in the very near future.

Surely at some point it makes sense to cut your losses and redirect funding to research on other diseases. It's just an ROI calculation.

Only if there is nothing coming out of this research. Many things are often discovered when looking for something else.

It's not just that we haven't found a solution. Cancer is not a single condition - it's a multitude of different diseases with similar mechanisms and different causes. The cure for one type of cancer is usually ineffective for most other types. Frequently researchers have encouraging results on one set of patients that never happen again on another set.

HIV is a relatively easy problem when compared to cancer.

NCI is one of the best funded institutes in the NIH.

Can you provide any data or any additional clarity? There's enough food produced in the world, for example, but it just doesn't get to the people who need it. I'd like to add that I wasn't saying that money is necessarily the answer. The power of crowd-sourcing, for instance, can help in other ways.

Sure.

The WHO produces a report on causes of death wordwide[0]. Heart disease and stroke are the biggest killers, but these are, like cancer, really quite complex. Diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections kill a ridiculous number of people, but these are largely solved problems in the western world. Organisations like the Gates Foundation are doing great work exporting what we know about these diseases to the developing world, but governments do a pitiful amount. A number of chronic lifestyle diseases are rising: lung/throat cancer (due to smoking) and diabetes (due to eating sugar). My suggestion is that we should prioritise disease research and treatment based on how many people are dying and how easily those problems could be solved. But because funding bodies are all human, and all in the developed world, the disease they most fear is cancer.

Regarding food security, there is technically enough food produced in the world to feed everyone, if we could solve the distribution and storage problems and prevent rich governments' protectionist interference in agricultural markets and corruption in developing nations' governments. But a large amount of that wastage is also not really suitable for human nutrition. Probably the fastest way to alleviate hunger is to enable each part of the world to feed itself with food produced nearby. Because we've reached the limits of arable land in much of the world, this means making more land suitable for food production, finding new ways to provide water, and making crops be able to grow better in different conditions. The FAO's State of Food Insecurity report[1] is a good summary.

0. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/.

1. http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/

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