I wish we spent more time studying why elephants [1] and bowhead whales [2] don't get cancer more often than they do. If we knew exactly why their cells are so resistant to cancer we would have some ideas of what we need to do to make ours the same.
1. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/44215/... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
Correlation, meet causation.
What is the valid counterpoint?
Humans are by animal standards very long lived and naturally quite resistant to developing cancer. We have many more anti-cancer biochemical and genetic systems (antioncogenes) that work much better than the same systems in mice.
1. Which mouse? An inbred laboratory possibly immunodeficient strain, a genetically engineered mouse to GET cancer at a high rate, or maybe a wild type free-range mouse?
2. Which cancer? Do you realize that it is almost impossible to get realistic models of prostate cancer or that mice simply live to short to get colorectal cancer - even when the relevant mutations are introduced?
Yes mouse cancer in not a great model for human cancer and we probably should not be using mice - about the only good thing they have going for them as a model is they are small and cheap.
Personally I would like to see us using pets (dogs and cats) much more as their cancers are a much better match to human cancers in both how they develop and how they progress. That we are not taking better advantage of this resource to develop new treatments is a tragedy.
Most importantly people for the last 20 years have tried to genetically integrate working p53 into cancer cells, and it has little effect on most types of cancer.
was the hypothesis that introducing a gene would start apoptosis?
Most likely having more genes means that there was a higher chance of receiving a viable beneficial mutation somewhere early in the animals evolutionary history, although it does little for the individual animal in the present day.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/
Speculation by a psychiatrist of course, and mostly in service to a metaphor about some totally other topic, but I wonder if there's something to the theory.
And because I can already see the down votes, let me ask you down-voters a question. With what thoughts do you imagine a CEO of a company like Phizer or GlaxoSmithKline wakes up? Is it how to cure more people, or is it how to make more money to keep shareholders happy ? And see how there is a conflict of interests, the sicker the people are the more they are willing to pay to get well and the more they need your products.
I'm sorry to say that but most cancer research you hear of in media don't want to cure cancer. Its just a business. Otherwise Apple could throw 40 billions of $ in it and come up wit ha cure.
At least in USA, it become such a fat cow to milk that foundations grew everywhere out of nowhere... go to your local store and say "no thank you" when cashier ask you "would you like to donate to fight cancer" and see their look like you are a murderer or something. Its next to "charity" best way for crooks to get rich tax-free while sucking on unaware populus.
The biggest thing you are trying to stay ahead of is the cancer spreading to your lymph nodes which is where the anti-bodies and white blood cells that power your immune system are made. Crippling these makes you susceptible to other diseases like every day bacterial infections and viruses which then could end up killing you. It's certainly not because they don't want to cure cancer.
Most cancers (80%) can be prevented though, and 70% of them are associated with HPV, a virus that is transmitted through sex. This is why sleeping around is unhealthy. You could be spreading it to every one you sleep with orally as well as genitally. (just another reason marrying your first love and being monogamous is healthy behavior). HPV has been associated with cervical cancer, breast cancer, throat cancer, prostate cancer, mouth cancer (noticing the pattern...).
And that's just one factor associated with cancer. Eating healthy (fruits an dveggies, lower red meat especially meat treated with chemicals) reduces other types of cancers associated with your digestive system like colon cancer (and is good for the heart and circulatory system which starts affecting you the closer you get to 50). Basically your arteries harden and your circulation gets poorer as you age and that results in other problems that creep up like high or low blood pressure that causes things like chronic headaches or numb feet, being overweight which can also lead to diabetes, etc.
If you take care of yourself when you are young you will have fewer problems as you age, but they are inevitable the older you get. But sometimes cancer is just a genetic mutation you inherited and you will get it anyway.
This simply proven:
Based on data from 2006 to 2010, about 33,200 HPV-associated cancers occur in the United States each year: about 20,600 among females, and about 12,600 among males. Cervical cancer is the most common HPV-associated cancer among women, and oropharyngeal cancers (cancers of the back of the throat, including the base of the tongue and tonsils) are the most common among men.
Now let's quickly look at how many cancer cases we're looking at each year:
In 2016, an estimated 1,685,210 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 595,690 people will die from the disease.
So I don't know where they got their numbers from.
You might also be interested in: http://www.aicr.org/research/research_science_policy_report.... -- which has a pretty great rundown of preventable cancer incidences. Quite interesting, really.