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Comment by zacharynewton | Hacker News Reader

"I'm hopeful that we'll get cancer cured in the next decade"

Not to say that I'm pro-cancer, but I feel like this is a little bit unreasonable. Cancer is a very complicated problem, and medical research takes a long time. Personally I think it sounds like Thiel is just trying to get swole.

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I wish I could find where I first heard this quote (I think it may have been here on HN), but it was something like "Asking a scientist when we'll find a cure for cancer is like asking a mathematician when we'll find a solution for equations." I know he was speaking a bit off the cuff, but the idea of a "cure for cancer" misunderstands the problem domain so fundamentally as to be incoherent.

We're making fairly rapid advances on treating different cancers with the fairly blunt methods available today. Down the road nanomachines would seem to offer a fairly straightforward solution to most cancers. Obviously cells don't live forever but am I missing something that makes cancerous cells resistant to increasingly miniaturized tools?

Yes, you're missing a lot. Your response is basically science fiction. Take a look at these statistics [1] showing cancer mortality rates over the last few decades and you'll see that we are not, in fact, making rapid advances on treating cancer. Far from it. And I don't even know how to respond to your nanomachines comment. I'm a biochemist who's studied cancer for years, and I can't even begin to imagine how a nanomachine could be of value for treating cancer.

[1] http://www.cancer.gov/statistics/find

> I'm a biochemist who's studied cancer for years, and I can't even begin to imagine how a nanomachine could be of value for treating cancer.

Nanomachinery would possibly be able to identify and remove cancerous cells from the body more intelligently then the body's immune system (similar to how evolution has brought us far enough to where we can engineer biology faster than evolution could).

Problems are either software based, hardware based, or both. This would be both.

That's like saying "a transporter would allow you to instantly teleport an object from one place to another". You're describing something that has no basis in existing technology. Currently nanomachines are simple mechanical devices like gears or wheels. To "identify and remove cancerous cells from the body more intelligently than the body's immune system" would require technology that can't even be imagined right now. Nobody can forsee the distant future, but what you're describing has no basis in scientific reality, at present.

There are two reasons why cancer is so difficult to treat: (1) cancerous cells ARE your own cells that are behaving differently, so distinguishing cancerous cells from non-cancerous cells is very difficult. And (2) cancer cells are constantly evolving, so even when you do identify such unique features, the cancer mutates and changes this identifying feature. Decades of research has been devoted to identifying such "Achilles heels" of cancers that allow them to be uniquely and sustainably targeted by therapies and the number of successes can be counted on one hand. We already have technologies that allow you to identify unique features on cancer cells (e.g. monoclonal antibodies) and deliver chemotherapeutic drugs just to those cells (e.g. antibody-drug-conjugates) and they don't work too well.

Cancer is hard and nanomachine research is in its infancy. I can't predict the future, obviously, but I can guarantee you that people won't be using nanomachines to treat cancer for the forseeable several decades, if ever.

> Cancer is hard and nanomachine research is in its infancy. I can't predict the future, obviously, but I can guarantee you that people won't be using nanomachines to treat cancer for the forseeable several decades, if ever.

Want to make a Long Bet [1] on that? Years ago I would've never thought a private citizen would be delivering cargo to a space station with the goal of landing on Mars, but here we are. Reality can be unpredictable.

[1] http://longbets.org/

The difference between your unforeseeable future vs. the parent's is you could see a government doing the same decades ago, which means the technology was available that many decades ago to a private individual of sufficient resources.

His unforeseeable future wouldn't be possible because no entity could do it with sufficient resources and will right now according to him.

"Currently"

Is a strange straw man to invoke about a future technology.

Teleportation is also a strange analogy to make for what is essentially our current cancer treatments plus miniaturization which has a fairly clear roadmap.

Not an expert , but don't antibody-drug-conjugates have many problems in their design that make them less the "ideal" targeting drug we're talking about - but if those are solved , their potential is quite big ?

Also , assuming we have the theoretical tech to sample a big set of cancer cells from a patient - collect a big list of all the unique characteristics, create a large collection of drug molecules targeted at all those characteristics with very very high specificity, and give them to a patient, won't this cure him in very high likelihood ?

Thiel's view of the future is pretty aligned with the Singularity people.

As for the future of nanorobotics, I recommend you watch this interview with Robert Freitas, an expert in nanotechnology and nanomedicine [1]. The implications of nanotechnology will be huge.

He claims that nanorobotics will emerge in the late 2020's and become dominant in the 2030's. They won't just cure cancer. They'll be able to a cure whole host of other diseases that are seen as incurable today, including aging.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UVet-OCFdI

Cancer survival rates are increasing dramatically. They have doubled in the last 30 years [1], and survival rates continue to increase. In the 50's, childhood cancer's such as lymphoma and leukemia were a 30 day death sentence. Now survival is extremely common, if not the norm.

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/surv...

I am pretty sure you would have said the same thing about infections right up to the discovery of penicillin.

There very well could be some breakthrough in immunotherapy, where the treatment is to send a cancer biopsy to some lab that makes a custom drug, and the cancer is held at bay indefinitely.

Curing cancer is on a similar complexity scale as fixing senescence/aging, and it is unlikely that we can solve one without the other. Cancer is the inevitable outcome of aging, if nothing else kills you.

It is a breakdown of the cooperation/altruism between cells that make you a multicelluar organism. We have several genetic programs designed to enforce cooperation, but cumulative damage in each cell over a lifetime eventually breaks all of them and generates 'independent' cells subject to natural selection, in our own bodies, with our DNA. All of our cells are cancerous, eventually.

Would you believe the claims as readily if he said he was going to stop aging? I would have to remind you that we don't even really know why we age.

It is fantastic and disconcerting that we are back in the age of wealthy patrons driving scientific discovery. I'm certain many discoveries and great art came from patrons who understood little about the field.

More to the point, there isn't a single "cancer" to be cured.

There are already very promising treatments for certain types of cancer like leukemia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/health/leukemia-patients-c...

A number of companies are working on commercializing these treatments today. I'm particularly excited that these treatments seem to be quite effective in putting childhood leukemia into near complete remission. The future looks bright for the human battle against cancer.

> Thiel is just trying to get swole.

I think you've fallen for anti-drug propaganda.

Many people take it to maintain health into old age -- not to become giant meatheads.

Haha no doubt. After yet another ortho surgery due to meathead stupidery, I was doing PT with "Big Sexy" Kevin Nash the tv wrestler. On GH, he said "It's the fountain of youth, baby."

I was just about to comment saying that if he really wants that done then he might want to start putting more of his money where his mouth is (even more so than he may be doing now) because that is a bit of a stretch (although I appreciate the optimistic attitude).

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