Tell HN: DanBC has died
I am sorry to announce that long-time HN contributor DanBC died last month after a prolonged period of ill health. May his legacy continue to inspire, and his contributions to this place and the wider world be remembered. Rest in peace, Dan.
https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/media/53jhyy44/neurodiver...
"Sadly Dan Beale Cocks, the wonderful Co-Chair of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Partnership Board died on 21 August 2024 after a long illness. Dan made a fantastic contribution to improving mental health and coproduction in Gloucestershire for many years and he will be greatly missed.
Before Dan died, we asked if we could plan an annual Dan Beale Cocks Celebration of Best Practice in Coproduction and he was delighted with the idea. It is intended to take this forward in collaboration with the other Partnership Boards."
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DanBC
https://medium.com/@dan.bealecocks
85 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadRIP.
Why does it seem like so many are dying of cancer :(
Then again, cancer treatments and vaccines are progressing recently, so that's good news.
the advantage of being warm-blooded is that your metabolism is more precise and much faster, but, as james dean quoted willard motley saying, 'live fast, die young'
most of the causes of aging are unwanted chemical reactions; https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2813%2900... is a highly-cited paper reviewing what we knew about the causes of aging 11 years ago. chemical reactions of all kinds follow the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation which makes them happen about 2–3 times faster per 10° temperature rise
(being old is a more important risk factor for cancer than anything else i can think of, even smoking and radioactive fallout)
small sharks around greenland, to take an extreme example, are at essentially the temperature of the seawater, about -1.8°. larger sharks could conceivably raise their internal body temperature, but greenland sharks swim very slowly to avoid this even when they are large. so their metabolism is about 16× slower than yours is—both healing and aging processes happen slower. their gestational period is about 8–18 years
In spite of better treatments, a twenty year old today is more likely from cancer while in their twenties than at any time before. Each younger age cohort has an increase risk of cancer, and at younger ages.
Cancer deaths overall are still going down though, as the smoking generation still alive goes out.
The answer was about three years. Eliminate heart disease? Another three years. Eliminate both? About five years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
But you mention "the average person," which is really the crux of the matter. Cancer strikes perfectly average people, oftentimes in their 30s or 40s, and hands down death sentences at random. A bad roll of the dice. A stray cosmic ray hit a dividing cell. Who knows? That is what is scary.
Eliminating cancer may perhaps only increase the average lifespan by three years -- though I have my doubts -- but what's much more important is that it would cut down tremendously the number of premature and random-seeming deaths in the prime of life.
Yet we also know it is not quite like that. If you smoke, drink, make sculptures out of asbestos dust, eat processed meats, shoot depleted uranium rounds down at the range and work with radium in a gun sight factory then you probably have stacked the odds.
Now imagine you have an identical twin, maybe not cojoined, but living with the exact same stacked odds. However, you eat a strict diet of highly processed foods and only play tiddlywinks for physical activity. Meanwhile, your twin rides eats a strict diet that is mostly whole food, plant based and gets a lot of physical activity due to a passion for dancing.
One of you is going to be likely to suffer a cardiovascular event before the other and that same person is going to run the risk of catching cancer first.
Now we all know that eating processed foods, maybe with the exception of processed meat, isn't going to 'give you cancer' and neither is playing tiddlywinks. Equally, a few extra antioxidants and a bit of fibre from eating a few more carrots isn't going to spare you from cancer, neither is dancing for that matter. Nonetheless, cardiovascular and gut health is important for reducing cancer risks.
I say this with anecdotal evidence provided by a car dependent relative that chose not to eat a fibre rich diet and now has cancers that I would not wish on anyone, with his digestive tract having to be trimmed from the far end due to cancer.
Because he took the medical route with meaty pies and moderate alcohol levels, his life might only be cut short by three years. However, by then, there will be two decades of extreme medical interventions and a smorgasbord of medications that have to be taken daily. Lifespan is not as important as healthspan and there is much we can do through diet and physical activity to maximise healthspan.
The trouble with my relative is that advice to go absolutely teetotal, stay off the processed meats and to eat fibre (as in vegetables) was not a message that was well received. This advice is in line with WHO recommendations but this can be simply ignored once lifestyle choices have been decided on.
Oh, come on.
Even if you're correct and cancer is not completely random but rather has clear causative factors, a lot of those factors -- perhaps the majority -- are uncontrollable.
Radon exposure. Naturally occurring radioactive isotopes or beryllium in your vegetables or water. That virus you fought off a few years ago. That course of cyclosporine you once took. That cosmic ray from the Andromeda galaxy that happened to hit you and scramble some DNA. Many, many other factors. Cancer strikes in ways that seem truly random because many or most of its causative factors have absolutely nothing to do with lifestyle choices.
Contrast this with some aunts and uncles who lived relatively clean lives, and still ended up dying of different cancers. Sure, I don't doubt there is a cause if we dig deep into it, but there's still some randomness.
In this case, the specific percentages are all the significance. When a lot of the factors are controllable and a lot of them are uncontrollable, the most reasonable question is "How much do the controllable factors actually change the odds?"
Short of quitting smoking, there's almost no way to do that, because you don't know what the factors are or how they're weighed & influenced by individual genetic, immune, and metabolic factors.
> "How much do the controllable factors actually change the odds?"
Not only does nobody know, nobody has the foggiest notion. I've never seen a relevant population-wide observational study that wasn't so full of methodological flaws that you could spend hours picking apart its defects.
Of course we know that there's a set of factors associated with the development of cancer -- like, e.g., long-term exposure to polonium in drinking water -- but there's also a large set of factors that nobody is aware of or which can never be controlled for. To use only the first set -- the set of what we know and can control for -- to accurately estimate the odds of contracting cancer within the next five years is impossible.
There is a very different level of dosage involved, that one cosmic ray from outer space that one time is vastly outnumbered by the trillions upon trillions of atoms that could be carcinogenic that come through the mouth, typically on a daily basis, for decades.
The body is pretty good at taking out the trash, including the mutant cells that did not reproduce properly. This goes on all the time. One cosmic ray from outer space might scramble some DNA but your body can deal with that as an isolated incident, the mutated cell(s) just get taken out with the trash.
If you overwhelm this system with too much garbage for the body to deal with then that is a causative factor that was not controlled.
It is helpful to see things this way because it enables a sense of perspective. It is not going to be 'forever chemicals', 'insecticides' or anything like that, you need to worry about. What goes in the mouth rather is what counts rather than these theoretical other things.
This means taking seriously what research in cancer, diabetes and other disease has to say. For cancer there is clear advice on what to avoid, same with diabetes and much else nobody would wish on anyone. It is defeatist to be in denial about this to assume that random cosmic rays play as much a part as the garbage we willingly consume when it comes down to it.
Reduce the odds it’ll get you too as much as you want, you’re wise to do so, but keep in mind it can still get you too and it is never somebody’s own fault.
More importantly, you can (almost) never say that if a cancer patient had done this and that or not done such and so they wouldn’t have gotten sick. You just can’t know and even if you did it’d still be a shit thing to say.
Walter Ehmer died at 58 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41490388
Jake Seliger was also known on HN died around 40: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201555
It's true that solving cancer, heart disease, and even all other similarly deadly diseases, would not automatically mean humans living indefinitely, because there's still cellular senescence to contend with.
Fortunately, we've effectively solved senescence (or at least it seems we're well on our way). Check out the picture of the twin mice from David Sinclair's lab (https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/research) - it's hard to believe the two mice were born at the same time...
And if I recall correctly, they didn't even do any sort of telomere modification in that study either... Don't quote me on that. But telomeres are another potent avenue towards >10x extension of life span, and also as it turns out, fairly trivial to lengthen and thereby allow a cell to continue mitosis indefinitely.
The problem to solve is cancer, though. Telomeres limit the number of times a cell can divide by design, and seemingly the purpose of limiting division in the first place is to mitigate risk of developing cancers.
Went and did a brief lookup (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6710558/) - life expectancy is reduced by at least 3 years, even for the oldest patients, and increases significantly as age at diagnosis goes down.
I suppose from the perspective of an 80 year old, curing cancer would in theory increase life expectancies by ~ 3 years, though I wonder how many people die of "old age" but have an undiagnosed cancer of some form contributing.
Essentially, in order to achieve dramatically longer lifespans, we would need to eliminate, or at least significantly slow, all aging-related causes of death.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...
Lost quality-adjusted life years would be a better measure. Many people survive for many years with cancer, but the quality of life drops significantly.
While the ability to treat cancer using modern technology (especially if it is detected relatively early) has made vast advances, we're also surrounded by and exposed to a wide variety of molecules that can, especially in high concentrations, inflict damage on the cellular control system (a whole lot of proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, cofactors, etc.) and while that damage may be somewhat random in nature, if it happens to hit a key sequence in the cell control DNA you get a cancer cell. You can greatly reduce the prevalance of such carcinogenic mutagens in the food, air, water and soil with suitable regulations but this cuts into profit margins for the producers of various commodities and products who in turn lobby governments to eliminate said regulations (which to be fair may not have been well-designed or implemented).
Yes there are genetic factors which may increase one's cancer risk but these are very complicated and often overemphasized by those who dont't want to see clean air, water, soil, food etc. regulations implemented.
I think it's worth noting that this isn't evolution's "goal". We just need to produce offspring and give them a good start in life such that they are competitively successful. Beyond that, evolution doesn't care.
Even for that, there's a budget. If it's not economical over letting us die and not taking valuable resources from our offspring, then evolution also doesn't care.
These explanations are however always a bit hand-wavy, eg why do galapagos tortoises live to 150 when they don't seem to do much parental investment?
https://www.clubvita.net/us/news-and-insights/top-charts-23-...
I mean, cancer is bad. But it's a good sign for society if lots of people die of cancer -- they tend to hit the elderly. Historically, about 80 percent of people who die of cancer are over 50, and that's fairly constant. (Interestingly, the share of cancer deaths that are in people over 70 have been rising, from about 36 percent to 49 percent - that's as a portion of the total.)[1]
The ranking for prevalence of cancer is higher income countries, upper-middle-income countries, lower-middle-income countries, and finally with the lowest rates low-income countries. Since the world is getting richer, it stands to reason that it's likely there will be higher cancer rates (of course, it's not guaranteed; it's possible being European makes you more likely to get cancer, which would explain the higher rankings of high-income countries, which are often European, but not lead to higher numbers elsewhere).[2]
This is borne out individually. Countries with the lowest rates of cancer tend not to be great places to live. Our World In Data has three countries[2] tied for the lowest cancer rates (0.1 percent), Niger, Chad and Benin, which have life expectancies of 62, 53, and 60[3][4] and had happiness scores (self-reported life satisfaction) of 4.56, 4.47, and 4.38 (out of 10; for reference, the world average is 5.27, with numbers for individual countries ranging from 7.74 to 1.72) respectively.[5] The full list of countries with a prevalence of cancer below 0.5 percent is as follows: Niger, Chad, Benin, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Guinea, Cameroon Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, East Timor, Tajikistan, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Oman, Sudan, Nepal, Kenya, Mauritania, Maldives, Bhutan, South Sudan, Ghana, Vanuatu, Equatorial Guinea, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Solomon Islands, Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Malawi, Rwanda, Laos, India, Uganda, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Djibouti, Congo, Botswana, Zambia, Kiribati, Lesotho, Algeria, Gabon, Mongolia, Eswatini, Morocco, Comoros, Honduras, Haiti, Samoa, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Namibia, Philippines, Egypt, Cambodia, Indonesia[2]
The happiest of those is Guatemala, at 6.29, and a prevalence of 0.4 percent. But most of them are much less happy. To take a random example (I used random.org to randomize the list and chose the top one and the top six, excluding Sao Tome which had no happiness data), Uganda is at 4.37, and the average of Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan is 4.41, nearly a point below the world average.
Life expectancy is no better; again doing Uganda, Comoros, Turkmenistan, Yemen, and Bhutan, Uganda had a life expectancy of 62.7 years, and the average of them is 66.2, almost 5 years below the world average of 71 (range of typical life expectancy is from 85.9 to 52.5).
Okay, so life expectancy and happiness are both lower for countries with lower rates of cancer, seemingly. What about those with higher rates?
Well, those with cancer rates up to or including 3 percent are as follows: Monaco, Bermuda, Italy, France, Netherlands, Finland, Germany, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Estonia, Canada, Norway, Andorra, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland. Monaco comes in at the top, with 5.9 percent with some type of cancer.
Monaco has a life expectancy of 85.9 years, the highest. In the world. There was no happiness data available for it or the runner-up Bermuda, but Italy ranked itself at 6.32.
Of the top five countries in life expectancy that show up on the cancer list at all (Monaco, not...
May flights of angels sing him to his rest.
To be clear, I'm not implying that you weren't those things, just making a personal observation.
RIP Dan.
I will miss Dan's comments, and this community was better for his participation.
It doesn't bother me that these numbers are "small."
With respect to DanBC, whom I did not have the pleasure of knowing very well, I am happy for him that he seems to be celebrated and loved widely - a clear sign of a good person (regardless of how valuable that ultimately might or might not be in the minds of outside observers like myself) who had a positive impact of those he touched throughout his life.
I wish all people who knew him all the best in processing this surely tough to swallow pill. Despite someone having a long-term illness, if you care a lot for someone, it is always seemingly unexpected for it to end. Dealing with a passing of a friend is always difficult, and I hope anyone who misses him, has people to share with good memories of him to process and deal with this in a good way.
May the joyful and kind memories of him serve as pillars of support for those who miss him, to move on and keep him in their hearts.
May Dan rest in peace, and in Gloucestershire. There are worse places to spend an indefinite period of time.
I enjoyed his commentary, even if often it seemed that he didn't enjoy mine -- I'll miss the perspectives.
Makes you think what your last will be.
Whatever it is it’ll live on in some legacy database till bit rot finally takes it.
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To those of you who took the discussion in your self-serving tangential rants, wow! “Know your audience” might be advice you could take to heart.
https://q.health.org.uk/community/directory/dan-beale-cocks/ https://www.instagram.com/dan.bealecocks/ https://www.threads.net/@dan.bealecocks https://mastodon.social/@DanBC https://www.youtube.com/@danbealecocks4344 https://www.pinterest.co.uk/danbc/ https://www.quora.com/profile/Dan-Beale-Cocks https://soundcloud.com/dan-beale-cocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DanBealeCocks https://spoutible.com/DanBC https://tildes.net/user/DanBC