I won't challenge you for their names, but if so many people are working on the issue, why don't we see any progress?
Sure we have 30 ways to cure cancer in rats, but the best we can do for humans is either to poison them with chemicals (some of them radioactive, no less) or laser beams that are only slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells.
Meanwhile we throw a fortune at the problem and throw a fortune at ever more expensive treatments -- for what?
The only recent success I know of is against prostate cancer but that was only because some ex-con got rich and started to found actual, aggressive, of the beaten path research - and that is still not a cure and only against one form of cancer.
So since you know these people, what do they need to get some useful research out there? Money and fame upon success is a given (Jonas Salk comes to mind) but what stops them?
There have been huge advances in, for one, breast cancer treatment over the last 15-20 years.
When you say "for what?" I can only point to the aggressive variant of BC my wife was diagnosed with 3 years ago. A death sentence literally a few years ago, she is now recovered and has good prospects for a long and productive life.
This is only possible because of the "fortune" of research thrown at her particular form of cancer in recent years; but it goes deeper than that. Because of the expense of the (relatively new) treatment and limited history of efficacy/results, her specialist had to personally argue the case for her to receive the treatment with our local health authority (I am in the UK btw so perhaps this is different to the US).
As more women (hopefully) successfully recover with the use of this treatment, resistance to spend on research will hopefully fade in the face of such positive results.
From the brightest cancer researchers in the world down to the people working in your local chemotherapy unit, progress is being made at a better rate than ever before. It's just very hard work, and I don't think money and fame really come into it - there are easier ways to achieve that:)
No. Just, no. The progress is freaking immense. Childhood leukemia used to be a death sentence - now? 95% survival. That's just one. My stepdad just got cured of prostate cancer, and no, not with weird-ass stuff either. Incremental progress. I've got a cousin who's surviving breast cancer.
Cancer is way, way weirder than anybody thought. It's not a single-bullet thing. Cancer actually evolves right inside you, for one thing. They can actually chart the genome of different parts of the tumor and trace the cell lineages. So any one drug has different effectiveness against different parts of the cancer.
So there's been slow, steady progress over the last couple of decades, and survival rates are way better than they used to be - and just getting better. But "treating cancer" is kind of like "treating viruses" - you need a whole array of techniques. And we're building that array. Nothing's stopping anybody.
tomjen3|13 years ago
Sure we have 30 ways to cure cancer in rats, but the best we can do for humans is either to poison them with chemicals (some of them radioactive, no less) or laser beams that are only slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells.
Meanwhile we throw a fortune at the problem and throw a fortune at ever more expensive treatments -- for what?
The only recent success I know of is against prostate cancer but that was only because some ex-con got rich and started to found actual, aggressive, of the beaten path research - and that is still not a cure and only against one form of cancer.
So since you know these people, what do they need to get some useful research out there? Money and fame upon success is a given (Jonas Salk comes to mind) but what stops them?
thrizzle|13 years ago
When you say "for what?" I can only point to the aggressive variant of BC my wife was diagnosed with 3 years ago. A death sentence literally a few years ago, she is now recovered and has good prospects for a long and productive life.
This is only possible because of the "fortune" of research thrown at her particular form of cancer in recent years; but it goes deeper than that. Because of the expense of the (relatively new) treatment and limited history of efficacy/results, her specialist had to personally argue the case for her to receive the treatment with our local health authority (I am in the UK btw so perhaps this is different to the US).
As more women (hopefully) successfully recover with the use of this treatment, resistance to spend on research will hopefully fade in the face of such positive results.
From the brightest cancer researchers in the world down to the people working in your local chemotherapy unit, progress is being made at a better rate than ever before. It's just very hard work, and I don't think money and fame really come into it - there are easier ways to achieve that:)
Vivtek|13 years ago
Cancer is way, way weirder than anybody thought. It's not a single-bullet thing. Cancer actually evolves right inside you, for one thing. They can actually chart the genome of different parts of the tumor and trace the cell lineages. So any one drug has different effectiveness against different parts of the cancer.
So there's been slow, steady progress over the last couple of decades, and survival rates are way better than they used to be - and just getting better. But "treating cancer" is kind of like "treating viruses" - you need a whole array of techniques. And we're building that array. Nothing's stopping anybody.