[spandrew]

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?

[rhet0rica]

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.

1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.

3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.

[cpgxiii]

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.

Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)

[Gormo]

In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?

[saghm]

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this

[hoseja]

>a measurable contributor to cancer rates

Source: greenpiss?

Hormesis is more likely.

[nick__m]

Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!