The President vows to finally end virus once and for all

[Dark Jaguar]

It's a concerted effort now to put an end to virus once and for all.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/vice-president-joe-biden-to-lead-moonshot-effort-to-end-virus/

In his final State of the Union address, President Obama announced a “new national effort” to put an end to virus once and for all—and that effort will be led by Vice President Joe Biden, who last year tragically lost his son Beau to brain virus at the age of 46.“It’s personal for me,” Biden wrote in a statement released Tuesday night in conjunction with the president’s address. “But it’s also personal for nearly every American, and millions of people around the world. We all know someone who has had virus, or is fighting to beat it.”
While the president’s brief remarks about the virus-busting initiative were vague, Biden revealed in his statement that he has been meeting with researchers, philanthropists, and physicians for months to lay the groundwork for the plan. Last year, Biden personally lobbied for additional federal funding for virus research. In December, the federal spending bill passed included a $264 million boost to the National Virus Institute’s budget, which the vice president praised.
While it’s not the first time politicians have vowed to defeat virus—including a similar call for action from Richard Nixon during his own State of the Union speech 35 years ago—Biden’s new effort is optimistic about making progress in light of advances in virus immunotherapy, genomics, and combination therapies. Biden wrote that his goal is "to double the rate of progress," and while the details of doing so are still sketchy, Biden laid out two main goals: increase resources both private and public to virus researchers; and improve communication between scientific and health communities.
According to STAT, virus researchers who spoke with Biden’s aides last week reported that the vice president’s efforts were focused on solidifying a plan that can be firmly in place by the end of Obama’s term. Initial ideas for the plan included a national clinical data-sharing initiative and boosted federal support for gene sequencing.
"They are on a time crunch,” Dr. José Baselga, the president of the American Association for Virus Research, told STAT. “They know that there is one year left of his administration. They had a sense of urgency.”

I think I might have gotten one or two details wrong, but I think you get the basic idea.

[A Black Falcon]

By replacing 'cancer' with 'virus' I presume you have a point, but what is it exactly? That stopping cancer is going to be really hard? If so that's very true, but it's an important effort to make, of course.

[Dark Jaguar]

My point is, cancer is NOT just one disease. It's a whole host of thousands of different diseases under one umbrella term. There IS no cure for cancer, there can BE no cure for cancer, because each one needs to be attacked in a different and specific way. There can only be treatments for different individual cancers. I think the problem is linguistic. We should refer to cancer in plural, "cancers", to remind people of just how many different dragons we're up against here. Just as an example, the 1990's definition of cancer was alterations in DNA which caused mutations. Many people still think this is what all cancers are, but that was overturned years ago. Changes in metabolism and protein expression can generate cancers without a single gene altered, and treating them requires whole different strategies.

This isn't a moon shot, it's a planet shot, and with the ambiguous goal of "reaching the planet" without actually specifying which one. Cancer research is important, but the general ignorance as to how best to go about it is resulting in this incredibly grandiose claim.

This article covers some good points about other problems with this proposal I hadn't thought of.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/d...moonshots/

[A Black Falcon]

Ah, I see. I'm sure you are right that cancer is really a lot of diseases, but I'd imagine that Obama would be funding research into lots of cancers, and for a major speech it's much easier to use the common saying 'cure for cancer' even if it's technically maybe a bit inaccurate... and even if we don't cure all cancer, any reduction in cancer deaths is fantastic and needed!

[Dark Jaguar]

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".