Once you’ve read your hundredth paper and followed as many clinical trials, it takes on another form. Near sentience, its the ultimate survivalist. It’s too bad it has such a devastating outcome on loved ones, we’d all admire it otherwise.
That and we probably need to repair the immune system. The incident of cancer increases with age, after all.
An immune system that has a hair trigger to new antigens would likely cause more problems than it solves. Some kind of ability to have contagious antibodies might be an actual improvement but the fact that we don't see that in nature tells me it has downsides that are difficult to see.
My biology education is a bit weak, but off the top of my head, autoimmunity being contagious sounds like a likely side-effect of contagious antibodies.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was created in hours after Covid was sequenced. So this might not be a too far fetched idea.
Most cancers are rare in your 20s and 30s, then get dramatically more common every year after from your mid 40s roughly.
To me, this suggests that the mechanisms that stop you getting cancer (and your body/DNA repairing in general) are themselves failing.
Of course, if everyone was 25 forever we'd still all eventually die of cancer, but it would take a lot longer than the current state of affairs.
I think that has much less to do with the immune system, although I think that can be a factor too
It’s just probability from a flawed replication process
But most people don't really want to hear that. We hear "big, scary death label disease" and we want someone to promise they can nuke it from orbit. No one wants to hear that we need to care for the body and foster its health while battling this "demon."
If anything treating cancer is more akin to antibiotic resistance. One therapy usually just selects for the cancer that is resistant, so you relapse.
And cancer cells have notoriously fragile genomes. I remember reading a paper that sequence 1,000 breast cancer samples. There were about 800 different mutations that led to the cancer. Very little similarity between patients.
It’s really the edge cases that get through.
I get it but the human genome has ~4^3,200,000,000 possible combinations. Even single genes have 4^1000 possible combinations...that's a number with 600 zeroes in it. That's a trillion^50. It's just odd that the mutations always seem to zero in on the right spot pretty damn quickly.
If you have a word you prefer I invite you to use it in the future.
It’s the pinnacle of (natural) selection bias.