The "100 years" thing is an easy dunk but it does reveal a fundamental misunderstanding about what cancer is that drives a lot of false expectations about "a cure for cancer" It's not a specific disease that appeared one day, it's not caused by a germ like COVID-19 or AIDShttps://twitter.com/MucciTina/status/1369300248338853901 …
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"Curing cancer" or "being immune to cancer" is this very general concept, it's like hoping to design software that's immune to bugs Like hoping for scientists to invent a pill that makes you completely immune to broken bones or bleeding
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So I mean no one should begrudge anyone their frustration with cancer as a phenomenon or their wish for a magic bullet But realistically all the solutions are gonna be tough because the problem is "ID and destroy your own cells with your own DNA that are malfunctioning"
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And we should not downplay that we've made incredible progress over the past 100 years Childhood leukemia used to be an automatic death sentence, now the survival rate is 90+% As awful as the process of chemo is, that's not nothing
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Tbf, there are a LOT of defense mechanisms to make cells kill themselves if they think they might become cancerous. We actually usually get loads of cancer -- it's the (comparatively) rare mutations which bypass the defenses which are actually, like, cancerous.
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Mind you, I'm no biologist, so I only have a surface-level understanding of it, but ~basic high school biology~ that I'm ~half-remembering years later~ tells me that it's pretty fuckin neat
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a recent
@hankgreen thread on the subject:https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1366515026509459456 …Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Realistically, we have cancer inside our bodies, ALL THE TIME, we just have strong enough immune systems for most of our lives that they never get big enough to do anything we care about. From this perspective, "curing cancer" just means developing a strong enough immune system.
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... and then you get into autoimmune disorders where the immune system gets SO strong that it just hurts itself in its confusion instead.
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