A important post for those of us that don't know Pieter since it reinforces that your personal attitude does not change the outcome of cancer [1]. Cancer is a horrific disease, but it is not one that bends to our will, only our science.
This whole story is very moving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
There are people receiving the exact same death sentence today, with the same likely outcomes.
Anyway, there's a book and a PBS series for anyone interested in learning the more about the current state of cancer research:
This is massively false. There are great strides made for numerous cancers, while for some others (pancreatic, colorectal being among the worst) there are still not many good options. For pancreatic cancer the main issue is that it's very hard to detect in early stages and when you get the symptoms you are basically already in stage IV. Pretty much the same story for brain tumors (like GBM, usually detected very late).
We also know a lot more about how to prevent many types of cancer. If you want to reduce significantly the odds of stomach cancer, you basically need to really restrict your alcohol consumption. Even for many cancers alcohol consumption shows up as correlated with increased risks.
So, treatments are improving, prevention is improving, but of course there are still cancers with very poor outcomes. At the same time, it's a major field of investment so many companies are trying to make odds better every day.
For these reasons I'm not sure that it'll end up being a lower hanging fruit than vastly better treatment of late detected cancer for the kinds that are usually detected very late now.
I say ridiculous because medicine is awash with similar predictions, the vast majority of which have never come true, or materialise far far later than anticipated.
The future does indeed look bright... from the very specific perspective of the researchers. Unfortunately if you are someone actually living with lung cancer or pancreatic cancer, for example, that bright future suddenly looks a lot murkier.
Fortunately my friend remains in remission, while I remain flabbergasted at the irresponsibility of that oncologist.
But the real truth is that cancer isn't a single disease. Treatments move slowly because its a host of different diseases which all exhibit the same symptoms of unrestrained growth and cellular immortality. So yeah, a lot of people are going to die of a lot of different diseases. "Curing cancer" isn't going to happen, because "cancer" isn't one single (or even a few) things to cure.
http://www.cancermoonshot2020.org
Do you have to survival rates for the various cancers. That's the benchmark, right?
I also don't know if 'cancer isn't a single disease' IS well known by everyone. In this crowd perhaps, but certainly not the population at-large.
That's sort of how progress and improvements work, they benefit those that come later.
> We're racing to get self-driving cars to save a lot fewer people
And those people working on cars are probably don't have the skills or drive to deal with medical research. That not everyone on the planet is working on what you believe they should be means nothing.
We need that sort of excitement and effort for cancer research. Eventually 40% of Americans will get cancer, for example:
I heard Craig Venter once say that the cure for cancer is early detection. Wish I could find the video.
Early detection is double-edged sword: It is very hard to tell in early stages if the cancer develops into harmful variants and a small false positive error can have drastic consequences, if applied on scale [1]. The result is that many undergo unnecessary therapy with 100% harmful consequences (not life threatening, but permanent damage like removed organs/sterility).
See also: "The Case Against Early Cancer Detection"
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-c...
I'd put my money (research) rather on better treatment than earlier detection.
Also, i'm not sure why we can't have both: better early detection and better treatments.
One of the vps from Google's moonshot division,Jeff Huber, just left to head up a company that is a spinout of illumina, called Grail
No affiliation, but they have a bunch of interesting software jobs open after looking at thier site
http://newton.newtonsoftware.com/career/CareerHome.action?cl...
This is one reason nobody recommends widespread screening for pancreatic cancer - apart from the inevitable false positives and so on. We currently don't have anything very wonderful to offer even to people in whom it was detected early, although it does improve the chances somewhat.