I posted about the science behind this a while back. When I heard it through on TED which was broadcast on radio I was genuinely amazed by the way it works. Good to see it's actually being trialed and could be a major break through.
By the way not sure what trial my cousin was on not so long back……stage 4 and fkd took part in trial gone no trace…..regular checks for nearly a year and all fine…..started complaining about pains in her stomach but still nothing found her sister said fk it your not right and I’m taking down the doctors who sent her straight to prince charles hospital only to be there for four days until they brought her nearer home to die……she planned going at home but the sister told me she couldn’t do it because she was so ill and needed care properly…..my cousin said it was the most horrific fking death she had witnesses fluid coming out of every possible hole eyes ears the fking lot…….anyway that’s life **** happens….all we can do is hope we get treated right if them in big pharmaceutical put health first and profit second but I’m not so convinced they have it in that order after what I witnessed over the last twenty thirty odd years
I know you have your doubts/reservations but this could be absolutely incredible Aber. Completely change the way we treat cancer forever. Possibly eradicate the need for chemo, radiotherapy, surgery and all the pain and suffering associated with those, often for months or even years, and slash waiting lists for treatment. I was listening to the radio earlier and someone was talking about the 75th anniversary of the NHS and quoting all the breakthroughs that we've achieved through the NHS in that time. The first to do so many pioneering treatments and this could be another.
10 million people die a year from cancer, so what happens when we eradicate cancer, within seven years you would have saved enough lives to mirror the current population of the UK.
This is one of the biggest problems man has created in the world, we now have the capacity to save/extend lives beyond what would have been natural and even create life for people who are not able to do it themselves leading to massive over population of the planet which it's self has a limited capability to sustain us. Sounds a shocking thing to say i know but it's pretty accurate. I marvel at the things medical science can do today compared with my own youth (never mind before that) but occasionally find myself wondering how far we can go with this before the planet simply can't support us.
I agree with you, I often thought the reason we hadn't found a cure for cancer, was because of the implications of doing so.
Every ailment we humans suffer from is meant to kill the weak and make the strong stronger Is modern science now making the weak strong and the strong weaker and as a result making the Earth unable to support us all
The number of people developing cancer has gone from 1 in 4 to 1 in 2 in the past 40 yrs, but at the same time the survival rates have actually gone up especially since the 80's. And the reason for the increase in ppl getting cancer is largely down to us all living longer. So all that kind of adds to the point you guys are making. I don't see a cure as a problem though. And cancer doesn't see age, sex, or ethnicity. Maybe I just don't want people who are young, who have their whole lives ahead of them being cut short. Parents losing their children, or young children losing their father or mother, couples starting out on their lives losing their partners. That's as far as I'm looking tbh and if that's limited then fair enough. I'm not sure if we are overpopulated btw. Or if we lack the resources. We're just **** at distributing them effectively and righteously. That problem is going to need to be addressed whether cancer continues or not.
Cancer is a bastard and has nothing to do with age, my point was more to do with prolonging life when things (body parts) naturally wear out. The over population is a real thing. we have loads of room on the planet but limited resources (food wise in this case) but also as crass as it seems housing wise and the cost of keeping people alive who sit vegetating at home or lay in bed (could describe many teenagers ).
We do have enough resources though. We just choose not to distribute them or use our land effectively to sustain the population growth which is inevitable anyway. Ironically the countries in the world which will grow the most and the fastest are responsible for only a fraction of the resources used worldwide. So one doesn't necessarily equate to the other. Whether we cure cancer or not we are going to need a rethink globally how we share our resources and land use, but it is achievable if anyone can be bothered to do something about it - I think that's the real problem.
So a quick search on Cancer Research UK and I need to make a correction on rates In order to understand the 1 in 2 figure, you need to wrap your head around a concept called ‘lifetime risk’ – something that seems simple at first glance, but is actually difficult to communicate. The idea of ‘lifetime cancer risk’ answers the question ‘what is the likelihood of a child eventually being diagnosed with cancer at any point in their life?’ But, in order to calculate this for a child born today, we have to make some assumptions about their cancer risk in the future. Traditionally, that was done using the latest available cancer diagnosis rates, and assuming they would stay the same for the entire life of our theoretical newborn child. For example, let’s imagine we want to estimate the lifetime cancer risk for someone born on the 1st January 2015. In the year 2075, this person will be celebrating their 60th birthday. Now we obviously don’t have rates for cancer cases for a 60-year-old in the year 2075. So our best estimate was to use the incidence rates from 2015. The same is true when this person reaches 70 or 80. At each age, we’ll previously have assumed their risk of being diagnosed with cancer is the same is it would have been for someone the same age in the year 2015. Using this method, it was previously predicted that for every 10 people born today, at least 4 would be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Time to Update The problem with this method is that incidence rates are unlikely to stay the same through our lives. In reality, incidence rates 50 or 60 years in the future may be very different, and our lifestyles may have changed significantly (for example, smoking rates will – hopefully – continue to fall). But imagine if you had a group of people who you could follow for their entire lives. You could then study all sorts of things: the average age they live to, how many of them develop cancer and at what different ages they’re likely to be diagnosed. And, thanks to the UK’s world-class cancer registration data, we have the information required to allow us to make these predictions. By trying to predict cancer rates in the future, and looking back at the data we already have, we can calculate lifetime risk far more precisely. Cancer Research UK scientist Professor Peter Sasieni is behind our new stats, and his work is published today in the British Journal of Cancer. Sasieni and his team started by looking at the year a person was born, and the estimates for cancer rates for a newborn child in that year. Let’s take people born in 1930 as an example. Instead of using the rates from 1930 to work out the lifetime risk of these people as they aged, the researchers took the cancer rates from later years – for example 1990 – to work out their cancer risk as a, say, sixty-year old. And, for all other years of life, they take the new estimated rates into account. This different method gives a far more accurate picture of how risk changes over the course of a person’s life, and now we know that the previous figure was an underestimate. Sasieni’s calculations show that the lifetime risk of developing cancer for someone who was born in 1930 is around 1 in 3. But, by 1960, for those born in that year, lifetime risk had risen to the new figure of 1 in 2. Now you might well be asking ‘what if I was born after 1960?’ For those born after 1960, we have to predict how incidence rates will change much further into the future. This means there’s a greater level of uncertainty but, if trends remain the same, we can say that the lifetime cancer risk for someone born after 1960 will be at least 1 in 2.
If we really eradicated cancer and other diseases didn't kill people fast enough the answer to over population: Send the newly graduated off to Mars for a decade. (Longer if they want to stay). We've got a few decades to get the tech in order... And if we can't keep them alive on Mars in 20 years... Well, that solves the overpopulation.
Regarding Fermi. All the advanced aliens if they exist are ruled by AI and AI is not sentimental enough to contact alien species. We're less than a century into producing enough radio waves, etc to be detectable across the cosmos. We're already at the dawn of AI, and whereas today's AI isn't real AI, it's just a fancy formula for regurgitating text, we're only at the infancy. If aliens only last at the stage we're in for a few hundred years the chance of any being at this stage in our solar system at this time is pretty slim. We will be run by AI one day, maybe not the evil AI from sci Fi, but once it can do everything more efficiently than us, it will be given more and more responsibility and power. Once AI makes decisions, it will be based on logic and best outcome rather than sentimentality. There will be no desire to attract attention from possibly hostile neighbours so the civilization will go dark. There's really nothing stupider than broadcasting ones existence when you don't know who is out there and if they might view you as a potential future rival. Logical would be the little green men wiping us out before we advance.to.become a threat.
I just think aliens are nothing more than a figment of the human imagination... https://slate.com/human-interest/20...t-consider-the-possibility-of-alien-life.html Whatever is out there is bigger than the human mind can contemplate, but that shouldn't been seen as a reference to god, nor does it involve little green men, or even tall skinny ones. What about the big bang I hear you say, sounds like a good human theory to me, and that is exactly the problem, because as I've said it's bigger than our brains can perceive. Aliens and God just fill a void of the unknown. An ant knows nothing of life or the universe, and we know just as less. So I'll just keep asking myself that same question, what is life and where did it all come from.
Avi Loeb doing his bi-monthly announcement that he's discovered alien technology. He'd be in a loony bin if he didn't work for Harvard.
