When it comes to cancer, there is an awful lot of legacy thinking and "way things are done" taking lives. Starting with the so called "standard of care", which makes patient lose precious treatment windows while they wait for a possible miracle from "first-line drugs" from thirty and forty years ago which frankly are not that good. But it's hard to reform because the fraction of people who ever think about cancer as a problem to be solved is quite small; and it ought to be far larger, given that cancer is the second or even first leading cause of death across much of the world. I wish Elliot Hershberg every success.
I'm pretty much a pessimest when it comes to fighting cancer. I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field. But I've seen people close to me die of cancer and it seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease. I agree that the standard first attacks are very crude and have broad systemic side effects and the attitude seems to be "you'll die without this so that doesn't matter."
I read some stuff about mRNA treatment a while ago that seemed like it might be promising.
> seems like the treatement is almost worse than the disease.
I think that's what the poster above you was saying. "Oldschool" chemo is basically poison, and the hope is that it kills off the cancer before the patient. But there are newer drugs that are extremely effective with way way way less side effects out there, depending on which type of cancer one has. Things like immunotherapy are really effective if you happen to match their targeted types of cancer, and some have basically 0 side effects, leading to a QoL improvement if they happen to work. People have gotten nobel prizes for some of these discoveries, it's really insane how far we've come in the last 30-40 years.
> I think it's just one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out. I say that not as a biologist or anyone who has done any work in the field.
I'm just curious, do you know what the opinions about this stuff are from people that work in these fields, or that have dedicated their lives to it?
I work in this field. It’s more or less correct but kind of lacking in detail. Cancer is a property of all multicellular life. I think it’s best understood as the behavior of a dynamical system that loses the feedback control that keeps cell growth under control.
Check out this paper from the Lander lab: https://elifesciences.org/articles/61026
It’s a bit jargon heavy but it’s a nice case study in how tumor growth is controlled through all the same mechanisms that normal tissue growth uses. Even cells with an outright cancerous gene mutation are basically still just doing normal growth and development.
I am guessing: There is an evolutionary "shadow". Genes for getting old and healthy are not selected for, because you get old after having children. Evolution optimizes for the survival of your children.
Might be that cancer hits after creating offspring.
I read a theory that we actually evolved cancer to ensure that something kills us.
Mortality is a feature when it comes to species level fitness. Sucks for the individual though.
i'm pretty much a pessimest [sic] when it comes to fighting smallpox. i think it just exploits one of the bugs in our genetic code that evolution didn't shake out.