"I'm hopeful that we'll get cancer cured in the next decade"
Not to say that I'm pro-cancer, but I feel like this is a little bit unreasonable. Cancer is a very complicated problem, and medical research takes a long time. Personally I think it sounds like Thiel is just trying to get swole.
Haha no doubt. After yet another ortho surgery due to meathead stupidery, I was doing PT with "Big Sexy" Kevin Nash the tv wrestler. On GH, he said "It's the fountain of youth, baby."
I was just about to comment saying that if he really wants that done then he might want to start putting more of his money where his mouth is (even more so than he may be doing now) because that is a bit of a stretch (although I appreciate the optimistic attitude).
I wish I could find where I first heard this quote (I think it may have been here on HN), but it was something like "Asking a scientist when we'll find a cure for cancer is like asking a mathematician when we'll find a solution for equations." I know he was speaking a bit off the cuff, but the idea of a "cure for cancer" misunderstands the problem domain so fundamentally as to be incoherent.
We're making fairly rapid advances on treating different cancers with the fairly blunt methods available today. Down the road nanomachines would seem to offer a fairly straightforward solution to most cancers. Obviously cells don't live forever but am I missing something that makes cancerous cells resistant to increasingly miniaturized tools?
Yes, you're missing a lot. Your response is basically science fiction. Take a look at these statistics [1] showing cancer mortality rates over the last few decades and you'll see that we are not, in fact, making rapid advances on treating cancer. Far from it. And I don't even know how to respond to your nanomachines comment. I'm a biochemist who's studied cancer for years, and I can't even begin to imagine how a nanomachine could be of value for treating cancer.
> I'm a biochemist who's studied cancer for years, and I can't even begin to imagine how a nanomachine could be of value for treating cancer.
Nanomachinery would possibly be able to identify and remove cancerous cells from the body more intelligently then the body's immune system (similar to how evolution has brought us far enough to where we can engineer biology faster than evolution could).
Problems are either software based, hardware based, or both. This would be both.
That's like saying "a transporter would allow you to instantly teleport an object from one place to another". You're describing something that has no basis in existing technology. Currently nanomachines are simple mechanical devices like gears or wheels. To "identify and remove cancerous cells from the body more intelligently than the body's immune system" would require technology that can't even be imagined right now. Nobody can forsee the distant future, but what you're describing has no basis in scientific reality, at present.
There are two reasons why cancer is so difficult to treat: (1) cancerous cells ARE your own cells that are behaving differently, so distinguishing cancerous cells from non-cancerous cells is very difficult. And (2) cancer cells are constantly evolving, so even when you do identify such unique features, the cancer mutates and changes this identifying feature. Decades of research has been devoted to identifying such "Achilles heels" of cancers that allow them to be uniquely and sustainably targeted by therapies and the number of successes can be counted on one hand. We already have technologies that allow you to identify unique features on cancer cells (e.g. monoclonal antibodies) and deliver chemotherapeutic drugs just to those cells (e.g. antibody-drug-conjugates) and they don't work too well.
Cancer is hard and nanomachine research is in its infancy. I can't predict the future, obviously, but I can guarantee you that people won't be using nanomachines to treat cancer for the forseeable several decades, if ever.
> Cancer is hard and nanomachine research is in its infancy. I can't predict the future, obviously, but I can guarantee you that people won't be using nanomachines to treat cancer for the forseeable several decades, if ever.
Want to make a Long Bet [1] on that? Years ago I would've never thought a private citizen would be delivering cargo to a space station with the goal of landing on Mars, but here we are. Reality can be unpredictable.
The difference between your unforeseeable future vs. the parent's is you could see a government doing the same decades ago, which means the technology was available that many decades ago to a private individual of sufficient resources.
His unforeseeable future wouldn't be possible because no entity could do it with sufficient resources and will right now according to him.
Is a strange straw man to invoke about a future technology.
Teleportation is also a strange analogy to make for what is essentially our current cancer treatments plus miniaturization which has a fairly clear roadmap.
Not an expert , but don't antibody-drug-conjugates have many problems in their design that make them less the "ideal" targeting drug we're talking about - but if those are solved , their potential is quite big ?
Also , assuming we have the theoretical tech to sample a big set of cancer cells from a patient - collect a big list of all the unique characteristics, create a large collection of drug molecules targeted at all those characteristics with very very high specificity, and give them to a patient, won't this cure him in very high likelihood ?
Thiel's view of the future is pretty aligned with the Singularity people.
As for the future of nanorobotics, I recommend you watch this interview with Robert Freitas, an expert in nanotechnology and nanomedicine [1]. The implications of nanotechnology will be huge.
He claims that nanorobotics will emerge in the late 2020's and become dominant in the 2030's. They won't just cure cancer. They'll be able to a cure whole host of other diseases that are seen as incurable today, including aging.
Cancer survival rates are increasing dramatically. They have doubled in the last 30 years [1], and survival rates continue to increase. In the 50's, childhood cancer's such as lymphoma and leukemia were a 30 day death sentence. Now survival is extremely common, if not the norm.
I am pretty sure you would have said the same thing about infections right up to the discovery of penicillin.
There very well could be some breakthrough in immunotherapy, where the treatment is to send a cancer biopsy to some lab that makes a custom drug, and the cancer is held at bay indefinitely.
Curing cancer is on a similar complexity scale as fixing senescence/aging, and it is unlikely that we can solve one without the other. Cancer is the inevitable outcome of aging, if nothing else kills you.
It is a breakdown of the cooperation/altruism between cells that make you a multicelluar organism. We have several genetic programs designed to enforce cooperation, but cumulative damage in each cell over a lifetime eventually breaks all of them and generates 'independent' cells subject to natural selection, in our own bodies, with our DNA. All of our cells are cancerous, eventually.
Would you believe the claims as readily if he said he was going to stop aging? I would have to remind you that we don't even really know why we age.
It is fantastic and disconcerting that we are back in the age of wealthy patrons driving scientific discovery. I'm certain many discoveries and great art came from patrons who understood little about the field.
A number of companies are working on commercializing these treatments today. I'm particularly excited that these treatments seem to be quite effective in putting childhood leukemia into near complete remission. The future looks bright for the human battle against cancer.
Actually there is a natural way to hack your body and increase your HGH by about 2000% [1] via fasting.
One theory is that when you fast, your body activates the HGH to help burn fat at faster rate.
I fast between 24-48 hours (didn't do it last month due to being on the road most of the time) and for the time I did, I could see gaining muscle mass in a short time (in about of month) in conjunction with doing weights.
How do you get past the brain fog during that period of time? My understanding is that your brain requires glucose, and that your liver will convert fat to glucose if absolutely necessary (such as when you're in ketosis), hence the "keto flu" transition phase.
Your liver doesn't convert fat to glucose, it converts it to ketone bodies (such as acetone) which the body can also use for energy instead of glucose.
Whoops! You're right. I had thought I read somewhere the brain requires another organ to convert ketone bodies to glucose, but it appears its the liver itself at cannot use ketone bodies:
Yeah, the liver has a separate metabolic pathway for converting non-carbohydrate organic compounds into glucose at a steady rate to regulate blood sugar and provide energy to the brain, it's called gluconeogenesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis
From my own experience I would say the brain fog comes from being too much used to carbs.
Recently I started doing 72h salt-water only fasting once a month and my experience is that I get somewhat dizzy after 24h in the evening, but after a sleep I can perform normally without any need to eat, even including interval training and extreme uphill biking (slightly salty water is important here). This holds also for the 3rd day, again, absolutely no need to eat. Motivation were recent articles suggesting rejuvenation of one's immunity after 72h and subsequent feeding - will see if it works.
However, I believe I can do that only after I went on low-carb/no-carb diet for the past 2 years - I remember feeling horrible the first month on this diet with what you could name as "brain fog" most of the days - I guess at that point my body was learning how to survive on low carbs.
Anyway, fast forward, I am now far stronger, calmer (also due to 5 minute cold showers every day) and have brain clarity I haven't had in the past 10 years, which brings relax to what would most other people take as very stressful work, as the mind can perform and focus better and faster.
3-day fasting is brutal. I don't think most people can do it.
I speak as someone who has fasted up to 1 week. Interestingly, the difficult period is exactly the initial 2...3 days. After that it's no effort at all - albeit physical performance seems to decrease, of course.
Drink water with electrolytes during fasting, e.g. a little bit of salt. If you drink just normal water, it's hypotonic and you'll lose electrolytes, bringing you to a hangover-like state - that might be brutal then.
You may well be right about most people, but in my experience it's not that hard. My wife and I have been fasting for 3 consecutive days each week for over a year (we worked up to it over the previous year). It's become pretty easy now. I rarely feel hunger.
BTW, I feel I must add (for the benefit of random readers stumbling upon this thread) that most people should not attempt long-duration fasting. It may not be beneficial at all, and there are certain dangers associated with it. Up to 3 days is probably okay if you're overall healthy, but most people should stop around this point (I can't draw a firm line as it's not an exact science). 1 week becomes pretty sketchy for everyone.
The human body could go on like that for a few weeks actually, but I don't think there are any benefits beyond 2...3...4 days [research needed], and the dangers multiply rapidly the more you push into very long durations.
Depends on what you do while fasting. I couldn't fast one day under heavy mental activity. I feel nauseous when I'm deeply thinking while coding for too long without eating.
@bitL is correct. 48-74 hour fasting has shown to regenerate new immune cells [1]
Also as others have said it, you go over a bump and it becomes easy. Also, there is a window where I'm rather productive and less ADD when I'm fasting.
There are a lot of interesting things that happen while fasting, and I think we don't have nearly enough research on it. I'm far more interested in the possible beneficial effects at the level of the central nervous system - that's where I'd like most research to go.
>Actually there is a natural way to hack your body and increase your HGH by about 2000% [1] via fasting.
>One theory is that when you fast, your body activates the HGH to help burn fat at faster rate.
That somewhat dovetails with generally recommended practice of having only scheduled 3-4 meals during the day without snacking in-between and thus giving yourself an opportunity to get hungry in-between the meals vs. constant snacking (incl. sugary soft drinks drinking).
I guess that's individual, you have to find what works for you. Some pro athletes I know (triathlon) do intermittent fasting twice a week and do strength training right after. I guess in the beginning once 1-2 weeks should get you started.
I do it once a week...Usually starting on Wednesday (I'm starting again now) and either go till Thursday or Friday. Actually there are times I'm less ADD and a lot more productive.
I stopped doing them, but I noticed that for me fasting for 16 hours is pretty easy, much easier than doing portion control of very tasty things that appear in front of me...
Before you spend any money, do some research. Unless I am way off, I was under the impression that HGH is not absorbed enough from the gut to be useful via that route of administration.
Unfortunately there's a lot of anti-aging and performance-enhancing quackery out there.
This reminds me to David Asprey: my coffee will give you unlimited energy ... Ohh by the way, I am on modafinil and HRT, but it's the coffee that is working the magic here.
It is very basic not to eat sugar .... Ohh by the way, I am taking some HGH pills every day
I'm trying a bulletproof experiment after New Year's. Care to share your formula/method? The one time I tried Kerrygold in coffee, I didn't like the taste.
Well if I was going to take anything that could possibly extend my life then I'd take Selegiline[1]. It has a few reported side effect like reversible transvestic fetishism[2], but, if I were a billionaire, I'm sure I could handle it ;).
his ego is definitely on growth hormone :) Amazing times are coming when billionaires will be able to defeat aging and ultimately death. And with time such options will trickle down to regular people.
"There is certainly no data out there to suggest that giving growth hormone to an otherwise healthy person will make him or her live longer. We did find, however, that there was substantial potential for adverse side effects."
"In laboratory mice, mutations with the greatest, most consistent, and best documented positive impact on lifespan are those that disrupt growth hormone (GH) release or actions."
Thank you for posting some sanity in here. There's simply no evidence to suggest that any of this is reasonable and really seems like a weird sort of confirmation bias. That is, he has enough money to surround himself with a certain type of person, and that type of person tells him a certain type of thing that is assumed to be "privileged" or "cutting edge" in some way and thus circumvents the requirement of peer review or consensus a critical person would normally require before eating a bunch of pills.
Tl;dr: There's no such thing as "ahead" of consensus.
I enjoy Thiel's incredible optimism, but he does have a tendency to be a little too devout to a fixed set of controversial ideologies [1].
Jeff Bezos famously said that smart people often change their minds [2]. I would encourage Thiel to challenge many of his deeply held beliefs about the history and nature of scientific and technological progress, and empirically compare our current system with that of the past. Especially if he wants to see cancer cured (!!!!) in the next decade (!!!!).
Thiel and his colleagues have a unique opportunity to set mankind back on our path of scientific and technological discovery. But in order to do this, we have to thoroughly understand the environment and factors which nurture scientific progress. With NIH and NSF funding in freefall, and corporations cutting R&D spending across the board, I would argue we are moving in precisely the wrong direction. Crowdfunding won't cure Cancer, and neither will startups. These are very hard problems, that take a very long time to solve.
Round up some VCs and fund a dozen Janelia Farms for the next 20 years. Only then can we talk about human longevity as a long term goal.
This is after a cut, and it sounds like he thought he was speaking off the record. They're speaking softly, there are sounds from the production crew or something, etc.
72 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadNot to say that I'm pro-cancer, but I feel like this is a little bit unreasonable. Cancer is a very complicated problem, and medical research takes a long time. Personally I think it sounds like Thiel is just trying to get swole.
[1] http://www.cancer.gov/statistics/find
Nanomachinery would possibly be able to identify and remove cancerous cells from the body more intelligently then the body's immune system (similar to how evolution has brought us far enough to where we can engineer biology faster than evolution could).
Problems are either software based, hardware based, or both. This would be both.
There are two reasons why cancer is so difficult to treat: (1) cancerous cells ARE your own cells that are behaving differently, so distinguishing cancerous cells from non-cancerous cells is very difficult. And (2) cancer cells are constantly evolving, so even when you do identify such unique features, the cancer mutates and changes this identifying feature. Decades of research has been devoted to identifying such "Achilles heels" of cancers that allow them to be uniquely and sustainably targeted by therapies and the number of successes can be counted on one hand. We already have technologies that allow you to identify unique features on cancer cells (e.g. monoclonal antibodies) and deliver chemotherapeutic drugs just to those cells (e.g. antibody-drug-conjugates) and they don't work too well.
Cancer is hard and nanomachine research is in its infancy. I can't predict the future, obviously, but I can guarantee you that people won't be using nanomachines to treat cancer for the forseeable several decades, if ever.
Want to make a Long Bet [1] on that? Years ago I would've never thought a private citizen would be delivering cargo to a space station with the goal of landing on Mars, but here we are. Reality can be unpredictable.
[1] http://longbets.org/
His unforeseeable future wouldn't be possible because no entity could do it with sufficient resources and will right now according to him.
Is a strange straw man to invoke about a future technology.
Teleportation is also a strange analogy to make for what is essentially our current cancer treatments plus miniaturization which has a fairly clear roadmap.
Also , assuming we have the theoretical tech to sample a big set of cancer cells from a patient - collect a big list of all the unique characteristics, create a large collection of drug molecules targeted at all those characteristics with very very high specificity, and give them to a patient, won't this cure him in very high likelihood ?
As for the future of nanorobotics, I recommend you watch this interview with Robert Freitas, an expert in nanotechnology and nanomedicine [1]. The implications of nanotechnology will be huge.
He claims that nanorobotics will emerge in the late 2020's and become dominant in the 2030's. They won't just cure cancer. They'll be able to a cure whole host of other diseases that are seen as incurable today, including aging.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UVet-OCFdI
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/surv...
There very well could be some breakthrough in immunotherapy, where the treatment is to send a cancer biopsy to some lab that makes a custom drug, and the cancer is held at bay indefinitely.
It is a breakdown of the cooperation/altruism between cells that make you a multicelluar organism. We have several genetic programs designed to enforce cooperation, but cumulative damage in each cell over a lifetime eventually breaks all of them and generates 'independent' cells subject to natural selection, in our own bodies, with our DNA. All of our cells are cancerous, eventually.
Would you believe the claims as readily if he said he was going to stop aging? I would have to remind you that we don't even really know why we age.
It is fantastic and disconcerting that we are back in the age of wealthy patrons driving scientific discovery. I'm certain many discoveries and great art came from patrons who understood little about the field.
I think you've fallen for anti-drug propaganda.
Many people take it to maintain health into old age -- not to become giant meatheads.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/health/leukemia-patients-c...
A number of companies are working on commercializing these treatments today. I'm particularly excited that these treatments seem to be quite effective in putting childhood leukemia into near complete remission. The future looks bright for the human battle against cancer.
One theory is that when you fast, your body activates the HGH to help burn fat at faster rate.
I fast between 24-48 hours (didn't do it last month due to being on the road most of the time) and for the time I did, I could see gaining muscle mass in a short time (in about of month) in conjunction with doing weights.
[1] http://anabolicmen.com/increase-hgh-in-24-hours/ (there is a link to NIH study)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketone_bodies#Uses_in_the_heart...
Recently I started doing 72h salt-water only fasting once a month and my experience is that I get somewhat dizzy after 24h in the evening, but after a sleep I can perform normally without any need to eat, even including interval training and extreme uphill biking (slightly salty water is important here). This holds also for the 3rd day, again, absolutely no need to eat. Motivation were recent articles suggesting rejuvenation of one's immunity after 72h and subsequent feeding - will see if it works.
However, I believe I can do that only after I went on low-carb/no-carb diet for the past 2 years - I remember feeling horrible the first month on this diet with what you could name as "brain fog" most of the days - I guess at that point my body was learning how to survive on low carbs.
Anyway, fast forward, I am now far stronger, calmer (also due to 5 minute cold showers every day) and have brain clarity I haven't had in the past 10 years, which brings relax to what would most other people take as very stressful work, as the mind can perform and focus better and faster.
I speak as someone who has fasted up to 1 week. Interestingly, the difficult period is exactly the initial 2...3 days. After that it's no effort at all - albeit physical performance seems to decrease, of course.
The human body could go on like that for a few weeks actually, but I don't think there are any benefits beyond 2...3...4 days [research needed], and the dangers multiply rapidly the more you push into very long durations.
Also as others have said it, you go over a bump and it becomes easy. Also, there is a window where I'm rather productive and less ADD when I'm fasting.
[1] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/277860.php
Something happens to the brain during prolonged fasting (within reason), and it's something that seems pretty darn good overall.
If you practice meditation, fasting seems to help a lot.
The research was also summarized as "always gamble on an empty stomach."
The published paper: http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(14)00...
>One theory is that when you fast, your body activates the HGH to help burn fat at faster rate.
That somewhat dovetails with generally recommended practice of having only scheduled 3-4 meals during the day without snacking in-between and thus giving yourself an opportunity to get hungry in-between the meals vs. constant snacking (incl. sugary soft drinks drinking).
Unfortunately there's a lot of anti-aging and performance-enhancing quackery out there.
It is very basic not to eat sugar .... Ohh by the way, I am taking some HGH pills every day
man! Kerrygold goes on the bagel and gets mixed with coffee inside your mouth :)
If you really want butter into your drink, it is done with tea (green) and salt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_tea
1tbsp organic extra virgin coconut oil
2tbsp Strauss Family* organic grass fed butter (unsalted)
16oz Sightglass* coffee (from 4tbsp grounds)
*both brands local to the bay area.
blend!
drink!
code!
If you don't like the heavy butter taste adjust the coconut oil quantity up a little, or maybe brew the coffee a little stronger.
But my point is not about the coffee per se; it's ignoring two big cofounders what really bothers me.
0 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akallab%C3%AAth
1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7997074
2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12151912
I thought the usual way to administer HGH is a subcutaneous injection.
"There is certainly no data out there to suggest that giving growth hormone to an otherwise healthy person will make him or her live longer. We did find, however, that there was substantial potential for adverse side effects."
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fgene.2012.00...
"In laboratory mice, mutations with the greatest, most consistent, and best documented positive impact on lifespan are those that disrupt growth hormone (GH) release or actions."
Tl;dr: There's no such thing as "ahead" of consensus.
Jeff Bezos famously said that smart people often change their minds [2]. I would encourage Thiel to challenge many of his deeply held beliefs about the history and nature of scientific and technological progress, and empirically compare our current system with that of the past. Especially if he wants to see cancer cured (!!!!) in the next decade (!!!!).
Thiel and his colleagues have a unique opportunity to set mankind back on our path of scientific and technological discovery. But in order to do this, we have to thoroughly understand the environment and factors which nurture scientific progress. With NIH and NSF funding in freefall, and corporations cutting R&D spending across the board, I would argue we are moving in precisely the wrong direction. Crowdfunding won't cure Cancer, and neither will startups. These are very hard problems, that take a very long time to solve.
Round up some VCs and fund a dozen Janelia Farms for the next 20 years. Only then can we talk about human longevity as a long term goal.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837
2. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3289-some-advice-from-jeff-be...