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Goladus | 6 years ago

bunch of papers is not actual progress

That all depends on the content of the papers. Protein folding is immensely complex.

An actual progress probably would be something like : effective cure for a disease found.

This is such a silly way to frame things. Often the reason you don't know a cure for a disease is because you aren't even really sure what causes the, or even if the disease has just one cause. You might imagine we're waiting for a "Cure for Autism" but what if we eventually discover that there are 20 different conditions that might manifest as autism and each one needs a separate treatment? Do you have the patience for that or will you just throw your hands in the air and complain about no progress?

There has been lots of progress in therapies and treatments for diseases, much of it hampered by the fact that protein interaction and biological pathways are so complex and there's so much we don't understand. So before we can "find a cure" we need to understand how the systems work. For example, in 2009 a drug called Cetuximab was approved to treat colorectal cancer, but ONLY in patients without a specific genetic mutation (KRAS) that renders the drug ineffective. That knowledge comes from understanding cancer genomics which requires a lot of statistics and computational analysis.

I'm not saying FAH is a dramatic world-changing part of this progress but it's clear that there is a LOT we don't know and finding cures for many diseases is going to take a lot of incremental progress that doesn't yield anything obvious immediately.

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matz1|6 years ago

Sure, you may call it anything else but don't call it actual progress.

Goladus|6 years ago

It's progress by any reasonable use of language. Your definition of progress is worthless.