How a software engineer invented a breakthrough medical device

There are a fair number of drugs which "treat tumors" (i.e. shrink tumors or stop their growth), but very few drugs actually extend the life of a cancer patient due to the metastatic issue mentioned above.

Technically, the idea of killing a tumor w/ a localized toxin is in fact already widely used, not mechanically with tubes but with things like focused X-rays or molecular targeting (drugs that preferentially bind to cancer cells). While this helps, it rarely cures cancer because 1) by the time it is applied cancer cells have circulated throughout the body and seeded new tumors and 2) it's very difficult to kill 100% of cancer cells, and what winds up happening is you kill 99% of them that are most susceptible to being killed by chemo giving the 1% that is most resistant more room to grow. Hence the recurrence is much more difficult to treat.

Really? Care to provide any examples?

The main thing to keep in mind is that biology is mind-bogglingly complex. More complex than our human, conscious minds can possible realize. This makes pills, devices and such much less reliable than one would imagine as an engineer inventing things, so the original poster has A point.

But... the very complexity of the biology field also means that the received ideas of experts about what is or isn't possible probably aren't right either. Probably, on the average, no one is right. So the experts could easily be wrong in telling you that a given approach will fail ... but it probably will fail anyway, just because most things fails.

However, it does seem like machines that rely on external tech might be easier than machines that rely on understanding biology - a machine which just finds and kills cancer cells seems more plausible than something tells the body itself to do something since the machine isn't depending the body to do anything.

I see lots of people spending money on things that they're told will protect them from cancer, so there's clearly a huge financial incentive.

> Similarly there is a massive and well funded lobby for power production and very little for power efficiency, which effectively achieves the same result.

Likewise.

And, I see people buying things to get them better mileage too.

In fact, it's hard to avoid seeing this stuff, at least in mainstream US.

In short, I'm pretty sure that the "there's no real financial incentive" stuff is "why don't the proles see what's obvious to people like me". The only question is whether it comes from cocooning or just not paying attention.

1) Lack of better knowledge in the past: For a long time people thought smoking was fashionable. Today we know it causes lung cancer, but it is now too late to tell all those people that have been smoking their entire life. This can be said about nearly everything in every other field. I would not say that we have better knowledge about many things now. Science is still not sure if eggs are good or bad for you, neither why many people develop lactose intollerance after their childhood. Because of that, prevention is pretty much a luck guess by now. We look at those who have survived and try to figure out why. Then we tell people to do that and see if it works, but there are so many factors that 'I' feel that prevention is in many cases just a gambling game.

2) Lack of knowledge of economy of scale. When the industrial revolution started, steam was on its heydays, and all that, the idea of recycling and efficiency didn't exist AT ALL. People really thought that Earth could take everything that was thrown at it and its resources would last forever. Only now, with a population of many billions that we are seeing that Earth is panting, trying to catch up with our wasteful ways. The idea of 'reduce, reuse, recycle' to save resources is very new and there is a lot of social and economical mommentum it needs to overcome before it becomes mainstream.

Some of these aren't represented by a massive lobby, but isn't that a good thing?

Consider, if cancer prevention cost as much per person as cancer curing, it would be impossible to implement. So the prevention that makes any sense is cheap prevention.

Moreover, we know of many cheap preventative activities, especially exercise and healthy diet.

Unfortunately, it is hard to get people to engage in healthy activities. Indeed, it is easier to get someone to spend $100 on a bogus cancer prevention pill than it is get them to spend nothing at all and exercise regularly.

So I'm sure research efforts will continue on creating a pill to give people who live unhealthily the effects of a healthy lifestyle... but I'm more than skeptical

Prevention is much harder to sell than cures because the effect of prevention is hard for people to see. If you get cancer, are given a treatment, and you live, you assume that without the treatment you would have died (death being the "counter-factual" observation that corresponds to the factual observation of your not dying), and thus that the treatment effect was big and important. But if you take a preventative treatment and don't get cancer, you don't have an obvious counter-factual to which you can compare your present state of well-being. You don't have the opportunity to realize that without the preventative treatment you would have gotten cancer and died: that counter-factual history never had a chance to play out.

Your "feelings" are irrelevant on matters of fact. Show your work.

Huh?

Suppose that it costs $1 and a quick test shows that it seems to help "a bit". Why not let folks skip a Coke for on the chance that the benefit is real while "thorough testing" goes on?

Costs and benefits apply to testing as well as deployment.

The FDA takes a lot more heat when someone dies from a drug they approve than when 100 people die from not having access to a drug that they drag their feet on.

Also... why do people keep refering to the "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" as a nobel prize in economics? It's not one of the subjects that Nobel himself thought worthy.