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Comment by 233mhz | Hacker News Reader

What do people even mean by "curing cancer", "curing aging", it's not like a single thing in the first place

Cancer sort of is a single type of thing, which is any mutation that succeeds at uncontrolled division. This can happen as a replication error, or from radiation damage, etc. There are an infinite number of particular mutations that can succeed, and so you get infinite expressions of cancer. But fix the mutations in general, and you fix the cancer.

Aging we don't fully know about yet. Naïvely you would definitely run into cancer problems without it, so that's why I wonder. We'll have to see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832938

I think you're downplaying the complexity of cancers, viruses are also sort of a single thing, if you don't think too long about it, yet you will never find a single "cure for viruses"

There sort of is a "cure for viruses", actually, but it requires perfectly controlling environment and intake rather than only altering the body, so it's less realistic to live with. Compare replacing unstable RAM sticks to cutting all network access.

This doesn't stop viruses from existing in the first place, though, only from reaching you. If you wanted to stop them from existing in the first place, well, you would indeed have a bit of a hard time. Controlling mutation could theoretically stop cancer from emerging in the first place, if we solve the somewhat less hard problem of altering the whole body (rather than altering the whole planet, as with viruses).

Radiation damage causes the replication error.

> What do people even mean by "curing cancer"

This one seems pretty obvious. Even the *The Emperor of Maladies manages to bookend it.

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