16th January 2016, 3:15 PM
Agreed, but read the article. While cutting funding to medical research is an issue in the US, the opposite approach of a glut of money creates it's own issues. Namely, organizations with no idea where to USE all that money, so they hire a huge number of researches, and when the money dries up, all those researches get let go. The better solution, generally, is to increase funding in a steadier incremental fashion. However, there's more to it than that.
Cancer being an umbrella term for thousands of diseases gets close to it, but in reality it's more like every cancer is a unique creature unto itself. There's families of them, and then there's handling each individual cancer as it shows up. This is the nature of cancer, because there's a million ways for cellular growth to go wrong, FAR more ways to go "wrong" than "right", and each one is simply called a "cancer".
You have terms like benign and malignant, and terms like tumor, and even those are just attributes of the cancer, not specific enough to define the cancer itself. As I've read more and more, I've discovered that for all our scientific knowledge, the vast mire of ignorance doctors are forced to work in as regards cancer is beyond imagining. There's a reason our tactics so far are very blunt. More to the point, there is literally NO chemical that can EVER cure cancer. The human body is too complicated for a simple chemical to solve them all. No concoction brewed from some plant or another is ever going to do the job, because cancer is complicated. The reason is because growth, cell growth, is FAR more complicated than anyone could ever have dared to dream. I might still be understating it.
Put it this way. Every single cell is a massive series of complicated chemical reactions which all affect each other, and all nearby cells react to each other and the chemical environment their collective reactions create to alter their own reactions, and this is how cells differentiate from each other. Combine gravity to "pool" a little bit of chemical change from one end of the group of cells to another so those cells do things differently, causing yet more chemical reactions, causing yet more, in such a complicated yet specific way that we get limbs and fingers and nails extruding from the whole mess with surprising reliability. It's just shocking when you get even a TASTE of how complicated just determining "top" from "bottom" is in development that it all works out. I want to make it clear, I'm no biologist, but I read articles online written by them (a lot of developmental biology lately) and every time I do, I realize just how FAR we are as a species from understanding even a 10th of the insanely complicated interdependencies and cross-chains of reaction that result in our body, and how the best, the very BEST we've been able to do is inject ONE chemical at a time into the mix to see what that does, with little in-depth understanding of JUST what it's doing beyond the outer symptoms.
It's also why the notion of digitizing a brain being something we could ever accomplish within our lifetime is laughable to me now.
So yes, let's do research more treatments and a deeper understanding, but know now that this "moon shot" is more like an "andromeda shot".
Cancer being an umbrella term for thousands of diseases gets close to it, but in reality it's more like every cancer is a unique creature unto itself. There's families of them, and then there's handling each individual cancer as it shows up. This is the nature of cancer, because there's a million ways for cellular growth to go wrong, FAR more ways to go "wrong" than "right", and each one is simply called a "cancer".
You have terms like benign and malignant, and terms like tumor, and even those are just attributes of the cancer, not specific enough to define the cancer itself. As I've read more and more, I've discovered that for all our scientific knowledge, the vast mire of ignorance doctors are forced to work in as regards cancer is beyond imagining. There's a reason our tactics so far are very blunt. More to the point, there is literally NO chemical that can EVER cure cancer. The human body is too complicated for a simple chemical to solve them all. No concoction brewed from some plant or another is ever going to do the job, because cancer is complicated. The reason is because growth, cell growth, is FAR more complicated than anyone could ever have dared to dream. I might still be understating it.
Put it this way. Every single cell is a massive series of complicated chemical reactions which all affect each other, and all nearby cells react to each other and the chemical environment their collective reactions create to alter their own reactions, and this is how cells differentiate from each other. Combine gravity to "pool" a little bit of chemical change from one end of the group of cells to another so those cells do things differently, causing yet more chemical reactions, causing yet more, in such a complicated yet specific way that we get limbs and fingers and nails extruding from the whole mess with surprising reliability. It's just shocking when you get even a TASTE of how complicated just determining "top" from "bottom" is in development that it all works out. I want to make it clear, I'm no biologist, but I read articles online written by them (a lot of developmental biology lately) and every time I do, I realize just how FAR we are as a species from understanding even a 10th of the insanely complicated interdependencies and cross-chains of reaction that result in our body, and how the best, the very BEST we've been able to do is inject ONE chemical at a time into the mix to see what that does, with little in-depth understanding of JUST what it's doing beyond the outer symptoms.
It's also why the notion of digitizing a brain being something we could ever accomplish within our lifetime is laughable to me now.
So yes, let's do research more treatments and a deeper understanding, but know now that this "moon shot" is more like an "andromeda shot".
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)