i think the trick is not worrying about if its impossible. Trick is just to enjoy working on the problem and not worry about the result because you are young and think you are immortal. once you have to guess on the total project cost and opportunity cost, you have lost already. Its permission to fail that you need.
The George Dantzig case actually isn't a counter-anecdote to the XKCD observation, because Dantzig was already a graduate student in a phd program at a top statistics department when he solved those problems.
XKCD isn't criticizing the positive mindset of naive-but-gifted researchers; it's criticizing the attitude of experts in one field that their expertise necessarily gives them unique and powerful insights into solving problems in another field.
Perhaps a better counter-anecdote would be all of the mathematicians in the 1950s - 1980s who solved hard program design problems with little or no experience actually programming computers. That really was a counter-example to the XKCD mentality: a bit of mathematics was far more useful than knowing the instruction set of the latest IBM mainframe...
Cancer research largely proceeds in the wrong direction, towards ever more personalization to mechanisms specific to one tiny fraction of cancer types, or tiny fraction of tumors in that cancer type. Then people are surprised at the low cost-effectiveness of the expenditure. Which is not to mention that cancers will cheerfully evolve around an attack on any mechanism not vital to their operation.
Insofar as anything needs hacking, it is this wasteful focus in the research community. The research community needs a dramatic refocusing onto mechanisms that cannot be evaded and which occur in most or all cancers. The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening. That can't be evaded, and all cancers do it. Shut these things down and cancer stops. Any cancer, any type, any stage, using exactly the same therapy. Yet the amount of work in this area is tiny in comparison to projects that verge on personalized medicine per tumor.
While it would surely be nice to have a treatment that works for every type, there are people having cancer now. If there is a treatment for their specific type of cancer, the research has paid off already, even if it is a low-hanging fruit compared to treating cancer in general.
>mechanisms that cannot be evaded and which occur in most or all cancers.
The problem with this is that if something cannot be evaded(is probably "core" to the cell) or occurs in most cancers, it also most likely occurs in healthy cells as well. 10000s of drugs are made each year which kill cancer cells, but the problem is that they are not specific to the cancer and kill everything else too. The holy grail in cancer drug development is to develop a drug that ONLY kills cancer cells and leaves everything else alone. We have yet to make one of these.
>The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening.
Cancer cells do lots of random things. After all, they are just a collection of "bugs" that occurred randomly in such a way that they present symptoms we recognize as cancer. Just because they express telomerase doesn't mean its important. Im sure they express lots of random other things too. "Obvious" solutions like this, have been tested by 100 people by now, and since we haven't heard anything, we can safely assume it doesn't work.
> Systemic approaches are important, but we need to consider that the system of cancer goes far beyond the biochemistry of cancer cells. Cancer relates to our fundamental constitution as multicellular organisms, our limited lifespan, the epidemiology of the aging population, socioeconomics and the future of society. Those who believe that the problem of cancer can be solved by killing or reprogramming cancer cells need to take a step back from the molecular technicalities and take a look at the bigger picture
He knows that this approach won't work before it has been attempted? I'll listen to criticism when it is followed by a suggestion for a better approach. And vacuous statements like "step back and look a the bigger picture" don't count.
The ability to actually reprogram cancer cells relates to...
>our fundamental constitution as multicellular organisms, our limited lifespan, the epidemiology of the aging population, socioeconomics and the future of society.
Like, hey man, you do realize that the killing or reprogramming of cancer cells goes far beyond the molecular technicalities of actually doing it?
Medical technology is lacking. With sequencing, we have a very hard-to-use, slow and readonly hexedit. With crispr, we have a very buggy and feature incomplete sed -- more like ed actually.
It cool to have some sed, but we may not even need that. We just need the equivalent of basic modern unix tools, like find, grep and rm, that work reliably, with good specificity and sensitivity.
Yet basic unix tools in medicine are decades away. Maybe it will be nanotechnology, maybe it will be more hacking around current solution.
Ya making a transform to go between the physical abstractions in biology/chemistry and the data abstractions in computer science should be top priority.
Frankly, I don't see how biochemists today could possibly keep up with the advancements in AI and big data that have happened in just the last few years (and vice versa).
I'd like to see everyone take a step back and look at treating cancer as solving a large matrix where no single cause leads to an outcome. We need genetic algorithms to quickly find local maximums and minimums, we need machine learning to see correlations between seemingly unrelated findings, we need better standards for getting longterm studies into formats that are easily grokked by AI.
These are all straightforward, but I sense that there may be some resistance from the medical community in opening up the research similar to something like Folding@home. And in fairness, medical researchers are doing the heavy lifting. The first step probably has to come from hackers in the data science community, working with existing public research, and they're going to need real funding (which may not come until after the first of many cures is spotted).
Your crispr = sed analogy is apt because DNA is basically code.
Cells, however, are not files, so I would be careful extending the analogy. There is no "find" command for the same reason you can't run "find" on your physical bookshelf--objects in 3d space are not indexable files on a hard drive.
Perhaps we'll eventually have microscopic robots that can search out specific cells, in the same way Amazon uses robots to retrieve items in their warehouses. But that's a very different problem space, where the focus is largely mechanical rather than programmatic.
To clarify, that quote is not something the journalist wrote. It's the opinion of Jarle Brivik [1]. It is also a statement that was made in the context of a few current moonshots aimed at solving cancer, and is referring specifically to concrete issues Brivik has with the paradigms underpinning those concrete attempts.
In particular, the quote is not meant as some sort of claim about the metaphysics of cancer or anything ridiculous like that. Rather, it's a (perhaps not so eloquently stated) way of pointing out that the mathematical and biological models underlying the current (and again, concrete) moonshot attempts fail to account for certain important issues and that this strongly suggests that those models are not going to result in cures.
The rest of the article summarizes some of Brivik's warrants, which are well thought-out. The claim is that the models currently used are fundamentally incapable of explaining how certain environmental factors effect cancer and the rest of the body, and that these environmental factors are important for understanding how to "solve" cancer because cancer evolves over time in often unexpected ways. The article points out, for example, that there are modeling assumptions baked into Microsoft's approach that are empirically falsifiable.
Finally, I'll just re-iterate that the argument made in the article is made in the context of current proposed/ongoing moonshots, so various comments about nanobots at the like are totally off-topic.
The article is not about science fiction. The topic is not whether maybe one day in the far future we might have enough knowledge about cancer cells to take a purely mechanistic approach toward curing cancer. Whether, the article is about the allocation problem in real science, today, and makes an argument against the efficacy of the approach taken by some current, concrete, well-funded moonshots.
The article is really bad. What is preventing nanobots, for example, from completely eradicating the problem of cancer at some stage of technological development? It's like the author wants cancer to have some mystical power over us forever and is fitting all current endeavors to that narrative.
I'd say the article is realistic, based on how oncology is currently done in the medical field.
As for the question of whether nanobots can completely cure cancer, that's scifi. Actually identifying tumors and removing them is a hard classification problem followed by a careful surgery. Generally this is done using advanced imaging, radiologists who interpret the images, guiding surgeons or doctors to either do tumor resections, or select chemotherapy. Nanobots are just a tiny version of the tumor resection, with the added problem that nanobots don't exist, they don;t' have the computational power to discriminate invasive tumors (at least, the current generation of "robot pills don't).
So let's focus on what is tangible in the near future: additional use of machine learning based on large training sets collected across hundreds of studies. That is in fact very likely to counter the author's hypothesis.
It is sci-fi just like having the entire world's knowledge at your fingertips was sci-fi 100 years ago.
If it is physically feasible, which it is given we have immune cells and they are just evolution-created versions of these nanobots, then it is just an engineering problem and we humans are pretty good at engineering things.
Things will keep moving forward; macro approaches such as your suggestions will work insofar as we can find the cells. In the end it will probably be a mixture of re-engineering our immune cells to better identify and protect against cancer, macro approaches such as the ones you mentioned, and more.
It is a hard problem, of course, otherwise we'd have it solved by now, but we've solved hard problems before. And with AI it will be easier and easier to do so.
you know I've worked in this field for over 25 years and while I started out thinking nanobots were going to cure diseases, I haven't seen any realistic evidence showing they have a promising future, even 100 years from now. I think it;'s much more likely we'll just study immune cells more and use them for therapy without creating nanobots.
> Biology runs on the same physics as anything else
Paper planes and fighter jets run can be modelled by the same physics. That doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. “Nanobots” implies greater degrees of freedom and function than purely biological techniques can manage. (For example, by incorporating digital circuitry and novel materials into the mix.)
Nanomachiens are to small and fast for digital circuits.
As I said, they can include more types of atoms, but that adds little as life already makes use of a wide variety. It’s basic capacity that’s the issue not micro optimizations. Further, depend on a non organic atom and you can’t self replicate without being fed it.
At the smallest scale you can’t for example take a picture, you need to detect stuff by touch and respond before bouncing off while traveling at 50+MPH. Make a vast structure like a cell and movement and energy become major issues.
> Nanomachiens [sic]are to small and fast for digital circuits
“Digital” means a logic model. Not a physical technology. Atomic-scale digital circuitry—completely foreign to life as we know it—is certainly plausible.
Your claim is that anything that can be done at the nanoscale can be done by “editing DNA to make a [protein].” I’m saying the latter is a subset of the former. Given all we have, at this point, is theory, it’s a reasonable point on which to disagree.
I get what you mean by digital, the problem is analog is vastly faster and more compact. Digital essentially reduces the solution space adding overhead. It’s not a technical problem it’s the core tradeoff for going digital.
That’s not to say proteins are as efficient as possible. Just that they are fairly close to the limit of what’s possible at 1 to 100nm. Now start talking micrometers‘s and I can see some things changing.
Science Fiction vastly overstated what physical things at this scales can do. I can describe anti gravity fairly easily, that does not let people build something.
It's sci-fi...sure...just like instantly sending messages across the world was 200 years ago. The point is that it is perfectly feasible that this will indeed happen, but the author suggests that "engineering" won't solve the problem because it's "organic" and "ecological". Well, so were many other diseases over the course of human history which are now virtually eradicated.
Nanobots are not necessarily just tiny tumor resectors, they could be implemented in dozens of possible ways with future technology (using some form of machine learning).
This is a very realistic deadline. Yep. The cancer problem is pretty much solved at 2026. In 2027 there will be exactly zero people in the world with cancer.
>It's like the author wants cancer to have some mystical power over us forever and is fitting all current endeavors to that narrative.
The author is realistic. What I see among young people today is technology worship. It's like technology has a mystical power over you guys and you think that it will solve every problem known to man. Technology has limits just as physics has limits, but you guys bend all problems toward the narrative of being solve-able by Data science, machine learning or nano-machines.
I hate to break it to you. Not only will many problems remain unsolved. The future will proceed in an unpredictable direction.
No, the author makes baseless claims about the future of technology under the guise of "being reasonable". Technology is just applied and abstracted physics, so I'm not sure what your point is there. No one said anything about data science...this seems a little ranty TBH. You aren't arguing against anyone in this thread.
>Technology is just applied and abstracted physics.
Like thats it. Technology is so simple. It's just physics. I'm arguing with your attitude and your technology worship. AS if nanotechnology is right around the corner and will cure cancer 100%. Cancer is not a trivial problem and likely a problem that will not be solved within our lifetimes.
All the article is saying is that data science, machine learning and all these buzz words popping out of silicon valley aren't the answer to cancer. But we have people like you heralding machine learning and nano-machines as the answer to problems such as world peace. Open your eyes.
> What is preventing nanobots, for example, from completely eradicating the problem of cancer at some stage of technological development?
The same thing that currently prevents nanobots (your immune cells) for eradicating the problem of cancer. So, why don't we figure that out?
Everybody in tech not in biology needs to realize that we HAVE nanobots--they're called cells or bacteria or viruses (also called minimum viable product). And, most of the time, those nanobots do a good job. However, sometimes they have bugs that get exploited and we need to be able to help out when that happens.
You are misreading the meaning of the sentence you quoted. It's a rhetorical question, synonymous with: "it is entirely feasible that we will eradicate cancer with nanobots" which then ties in with the remainder of the argument which you left out.
fwiw, there is an excellent (pulitzer prize winning, fwiw) book called "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee which gives history of cancer treatment and research, coupled with author's experience as an oncologist.
As someone who works at a place mentioned in this article, I can tell you, we do not subscribe the belief set he says we do, and actually, likely agree with the author that cancer is a systemic disease that involves not only the tumor, but also the TME, the peripheral immune system, other organs, etc. The "tumor only" view of cancer is dead and has been very a while, and even "Silicon Valley" knows this.
Also, for those here: checkpoint inhibitor therapies are a "better approach" that incorporate a systemic activation of a patient's immune system to kill cancer, and they really, really work (see: Nobel Prize this year to Jim Allison).
This is also not perfect, as for example those with autoimmune conditions will not always work and can actually get worse under immunotherapy. My wife has stage 4 lung cancer due to Scleroderma immunosuppression medication and is struggling with the treatments due to the reactions ( immune system attacking non cancer cells ).
As a cancer survivor, my heart goes out to you both.
As someone who also works for a company that makes a checkpoint inhibitor, one of our chief efforts is to better understand what makes them work for some patients and not others. Not only would this knowledge serve the lucky patients by tuning their therapy for better efficacy and lesser side effects, but would help us know more about how CPIs fail, and ideally, to enable their use in the many, as yet, unlucky patients.
Cancer is definitely shapeshifting and it's a constant battle on all fronts.
One drug may work now (eg. anti folates) but then remission fails and it's back to the fight.
The primary tumor may go into semi-remission but mestasis may happen then you have to treat that instead.
The tumors suck so much energy from the person's body so it can attack on that front too.
I think immunotherapy is the future and am really sad that it is so expensive. It's like Elysium, Keytruda is ~$400k it's sad how costly these drugs are.
I think diet, environment, and habit are the things that have the most effect over time because it's really just your cells multiplying in an uncontrollable rate and the body cannot stop the function or the garbage collectors are unable to make the cell perform aptosis.
There are many things that go in and out of your body over time that will help increase or decrease the amount of these types of cells that are produced.
The author seems to think there's a certain class of researchers with software backgrounds who want to cure cancer; have the hypothesis that cancer is, always and everywhere, a purely genetic phenomenon; and enshrine this hypothesis as indisputable fact ignoring all evidence to the contrary. This seems like a straw man.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I would argue that one of the biggest barriers to fighting climate change is the blind belief in technology as the solution to any problem facing humanity. In many ways it is a cult. But in order to fight climate change we might need to turn to simpler, more low-tech solutions.
I mean, we're spending all that effort flying to the moon and trying to program cancer cells, while all we really should do to fight cancer is clean up the air we breathe, stop spraying pesticide on our food and lead less stressful lives. Just saying...
That is not how cancer happens. Cancer happens because we live and some factors make it more likely that cancer happens. But even in a clean world we would get cancer...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 64.6 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Mathematical_st...
that is, "not at all in the usual case"
XKCD isn't criticizing the positive mindset of naive-but-gifted researchers; it's criticizing the attitude of experts in one field that their expertise necessarily gives them unique and powerful insights into solving problems in another field.
Perhaps a better counter-anecdote would be all of the mathematicians in the 1950s - 1980s who solved hard program design problems with little or no experience actually programming computers. That really was a counter-example to the XKCD mentality: a bit of mathematics was far more useful than knowing the instruction set of the latest IBM mainframe...
Insofar as anything needs hacking, it is this wasteful focus in the research community. The research community needs a dramatic refocusing onto mechanisms that cannot be evaded and which occur in most or all cancers. The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening. That can't be evaded, and all cancers do it. Shut these things down and cancer stops. Any cancer, any type, any stage, using exactly the same therapy. Yet the amount of work in this area is tiny in comparison to projects that verge on personalized medicine per tumor.
The problem with this is that if something cannot be evaded(is probably "core" to the cell) or occurs in most cancers, it also most likely occurs in healthy cells as well. 10000s of drugs are made each year which kill cancer cells, but the problem is that they are not specific to the cancer and kill everything else too. The holy grail in cancer drug development is to develop a drug that ONLY kills cancer cells and leaves everything else alone. We have yet to make one of these.
>The canonical example is to interfere in telomerase and ALT telomere lengthening.
Cancer cells do lots of random things. After all, they are just a collection of "bugs" that occurred randomly in such a way that they present symptoms we recognize as cancer. Just because they express telomerase doesn't mean its important. Im sure they express lots of random other things too. "Obvious" solutions like this, have been tested by 100 people by now, and since we haven't heard anything, we can safely assume it doesn't work.
Yeah, and so do adult stem cells. As long as your patient doesn't need intestinal walls, skin, or blood, this will be a totally successful treatment!
Have you entertained the hypothesis that people studying cancer might know more about biology than anti-aging cranks?
He knows that this approach won't work before it has been attempted? I'll listen to criticism when it is followed by a suggestion for a better approach. And vacuous statements like "step back and look a the bigger picture" don't count.
>our fundamental constitution as multicellular organisms, our limited lifespan, the epidemiology of the aging population, socioeconomics and the future of society.
Like, hey man, you do realize that the killing or reprogramming of cancer cells goes far beyond the molecular technicalities of actually doing it?
Yup. It’s a pretty vacuous critism.
It cool to have some sed, but we may not even need that. We just need the equivalent of basic modern unix tools, like find, grep and rm, that work reliably, with good specificity and sensitivity.
Yet basic unix tools in medicine are decades away. Maybe it will be nanotechnology, maybe it will be more hacking around current solution.
Still, the problem is just:
find /body -type cancer_12BA |grep -v cancer_12BA_market_but_usefull_stemcell |xargs rm
The solution is technological, not philosophical.
Frankly, I don't see how biochemists today could possibly keep up with the advancements in AI and big data that have happened in just the last few years (and vice versa).
I'd like to see everyone take a step back and look at treating cancer as solving a large matrix where no single cause leads to an outcome. We need genetic algorithms to quickly find local maximums and minimums, we need machine learning to see correlations between seemingly unrelated findings, we need better standards for getting longterm studies into formats that are easily grokked by AI.
These are all straightforward, but I sense that there may be some resistance from the medical community in opening up the research similar to something like Folding@home. And in fairness, medical researchers are doing the heavy lifting. The first step probably has to come from hackers in the data science community, working with existing public research, and they're going to need real funding (which may not come until after the first of many cures is spotted).
Cells, however, are not files, so I would be careful extending the analogy. There is no "find" command for the same reason you can't run "find" on your physical bookshelf--objects in 3d space are not indexable files on a hard drive.
Perhaps we'll eventually have microscopic robots that can search out specific cells, in the same way Amazon uses robots to retrieve items in their warehouses. But that's a very different problem space, where the focus is largely mechanical rather than programmatic.
In particular, the quote is not meant as some sort of claim about the metaphysics of cancer or anything ridiculous like that. Rather, it's a (perhaps not so eloquently stated) way of pointing out that the mathematical and biological models underlying the current (and again, concrete) moonshot attempts fail to account for certain important issues and that this strongly suggests that those models are not going to result in cures.
The rest of the article summarizes some of Brivik's warrants, which are well thought-out. The claim is that the models currently used are fundamentally incapable of explaining how certain environmental factors effect cancer and the rest of the body, and that these environmental factors are important for understanding how to "solve" cancer because cancer evolves over time in often unexpected ways. The article points out, for example, that there are modeling assumptions baked into Microsoft's approach that are empirically falsifiable.
Finally, I'll just re-iterate that the argument made in the article is made in the context of current proposed/ongoing moonshots, so various comments about nanobots at the like are totally off-topic.
The article is not about science fiction. The topic is not whether maybe one day in the far future we might have enough knowledge about cancer cells to take a purely mechanistic approach toward curing cancer. Whether, the article is about the allocation problem in real science, today, and makes an argument against the efficacy of the approach taken by some current, concrete, well-funded moonshots.
[1] https://www.med.uio.no/imb/english/people/aca/jbreivik/
As for the question of whether nanobots can completely cure cancer, that's scifi. Actually identifying tumors and removing them is a hard classification problem followed by a careful surgery. Generally this is done using advanced imaging, radiologists who interpret the images, guiding surgeons or doctors to either do tumor resections, or select chemotherapy. Nanobots are just a tiny version of the tumor resection, with the added problem that nanobots don't exist, they don;t' have the computational power to discriminate invasive tumors (at least, the current generation of "robot pills don't).
So let's focus on what is tangible in the near future: additional use of machine learning based on large training sets collected across hundreds of studies. That is in fact very likely to counter the author's hypothesis.
If it is physically feasible, which it is given we have immune cells and they are just evolution-created versions of these nanobots, then it is just an engineering problem and we humans are pretty good at engineering things.
Things will keep moving forward; macro approaches such as your suggestions will work insofar as we can find the cells. In the end it will probably be a mixture of re-engineering our immune cells to better identify and protect against cancer, macro approaches such as the ones you mentioned, and more.
It is a hard problem, of course, otherwise we'd have it solved by now, but we've solved hard problems before. And with AI it will be easier and easier to do so.
We’re not yet at nanoscale manufacturing in one of the few domains with the scale and capital to fund its development: microprocessor manufacturing.
Re-defining biology as “nanobots” renders the latter word useless.
Paper planes and fighter jets run can be modelled by the same physics. That doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. “Nanobots” implies greater degrees of freedom and function than purely biological techniques can manage. (For example, by incorporating digital circuitry and novel materials into the mix.)
As I said, they can include more types of atoms, but that adds little as life already makes use of a wide variety. It’s basic capacity that’s the issue not micro optimizations. Further, depend on a non organic atom and you can’t self replicate without being fed it.
At the smallest scale you can’t for example take a picture, you need to detect stuff by touch and respond before bouncing off while traveling at 50+MPH. Make a vast structure like a cell and movement and energy become major issues.
“Digital” means a logic model. Not a physical technology. Atomic-scale digital circuitry—completely foreign to life as we know it—is certainly plausible.
Your claim is that anything that can be done at the nanoscale can be done by “editing DNA to make a [protein].” I’m saying the latter is a subset of the former. Given all we have, at this point, is theory, it’s a reasonable point on which to disagree.
That’s not to say proteins are as efficient as possible. Just that they are fairly close to the limit of what’s possible at 1 to 100nm. Now start talking micrometers‘s and I can see some things changing.
Science Fiction vastly overstated what physical things at this scales can do. I can describe anti gravity fairly easily, that does not let people build something.
Nanobots are not necessarily just tiny tumor resectors, they could be implemented in dozens of possible ways with future technology (using some form of machine learning).
The author is realistic. What I see among young people today is technology worship. It's like technology has a mystical power over you guys and you think that it will solve every problem known to man. Technology has limits just as physics has limits, but you guys bend all problems toward the narrative of being solve-able by Data science, machine learning or nano-machines.
I hate to break it to you. Not only will many problems remain unsolved. The future will proceed in an unpredictable direction.
>Technology is just applied and abstracted physics.
Like thats it. Technology is so simple. It's just physics. I'm arguing with your attitude and your technology worship. AS if nanotechnology is right around the corner and will cure cancer 100%. Cancer is not a trivial problem and likely a problem that will not be solved within our lifetimes.
All the article is saying is that data science, machine learning and all these buzz words popping out of silicon valley aren't the answer to cancer. But we have people like you heralding machine learning and nano-machines as the answer to problems such as world peace. Open your eyes.
The same thing that currently prevents nanobots (your immune cells) for eradicating the problem of cancer. So, why don't we figure that out?
Everybody in tech not in biology needs to realize that we HAVE nanobots--they're called cells or bacteria or viruses (also called minimum viable product). And, most of the time, those nanobots do a good job. However, sometimes they have bugs that get exploited and we need to be able to help out when that happens.
Also, for those here: checkpoint inhibitor therapies are a "better approach" that incorporate a systemic activation of a patient's immune system to kill cancer, and they really, really work (see: Nobel Prize this year to Jim Allison).
As someone who also works for a company that makes a checkpoint inhibitor, one of our chief efforts is to better understand what makes them work for some patients and not others. Not only would this knowledge serve the lucky patients by tuning their therapy for better efficacy and lesser side effects, but would help us know more about how CPIs fail, and ideally, to enable their use in the many, as yet, unlucky patients.
Cancer is definitely shapeshifting and it's a constant battle on all fronts.
One drug may work now (eg. anti folates) but then remission fails and it's back to the fight.
The primary tumor may go into semi-remission but mestasis may happen then you have to treat that instead.
The tumors suck so much energy from the person's body so it can attack on that front too.
I think immunotherapy is the future and am really sad that it is so expensive. It's like Elysium, Keytruda is ~$400k it's sad how costly these drugs are.
I think diet, environment, and habit are the things that have the most effect over time because it's really just your cells multiplying in an uncontrollable rate and the body cannot stop the function or the garbage collectors are unable to make the cell perform aptosis.
There are many things that go in and out of your body over time that will help increase or decrease the amount of these types of cells that are produced.
I would argue that one of the biggest barriers to fighting climate change is the blind belief in technology as the solution to any problem facing humanity. In many ways it is a cult. But in order to fight climate change we might need to turn to simpler, more low-tech solutions.
I mean, we're spending all that effort flying to the moon and trying to program cancer cells, while all we really should do to fight cancer is clean up the air we breathe, stop spraying pesticide on our food and lead less stressful lives. Just saying...
And btw., how would you clean up the world?