Congress voted against funding a cure for cancer just to block a win for Biden
Congress voted against funding a cure for cancer just to block a win for Biden
The Moonshot program was the largest, organized effort by the U.S. government to find cancer cures. Congress voted it down.
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Tbh, a cure for cancer is a little like finding a cure for all respiratory infections. You're talking about a pathology that encompasses hundreds of distinct diseases. Sure, maybe it is doable, but calling it a moonshot is a little generous; landing on the moon would be several orders of magnitude easier by comparison, imo.
Just so I'm clear, it's still shitty that they blocked this.
Read the article. It’s pretty clear that cancer is hundreds of different diseases and extremely unlikely to have a single silver bullet, but this description reads more like a coordination project
the program has made strides in expanding access to cancer detection screenings, especially to veterans, increased support for programs aimed at preventing cancer in the first place and provided funding to groundbreaking cancer cure research
Its goal is to cut cancer deaths in half by making diagnostics cheaper and more available, funding prevention, and funding research into treatments. No magical silver bullets here
When you type out the words "read the article", it forms a verbal missile of hate aimed right at my heart
Ouch. Not intended as that but I do think your concern was answered in the article, and we’re all sometimes guilty of skimming the article or reacting to inflammatory headlines
I was being dramatic, no need for alarm. I read several articles a day, typically, but I'm usually pretty selective about it and this one didn't make the cut, though I still wanted to discuss the topic. So, here we are.
I find it interesting that for many serious diseases, the biggest determinant of outcome can be how early you detect it. It’s not something I ever really appreciated before the advent of so many inexpensive tests, and seeing all sorts of stats on just how much difference early detection can make!
Yeah, particularly for cancer. Cancer, as I understand it, is a dice game from start to finish. The two commonalities all cancers have are that they're cells that have immortalized and reproduce out of control. That is, they don't die when they get signals to die, and they pick up one or more mutations that cause them to undergo cellular division at a higher rate than normal. This is how we still have HeLa cells today. So, the first dice game is getting one cell in your tissue to roll some flavor of those mutations together. From there, the dice start piling up in Cancer's favor that it can roll more mutations to help it survive when it shouldn't. The earlier you pick it up, the fewer dice cancer has to play with. Not to mention you're not also having to fight the battle of trying to kill the cancer while it tries to kill you.
This is also one of the fronts where it's thought that mRNA vaccines are going to be huge. In fact, IIRC, the technology was specifically developed with cancer in mind and its use for creating pathogen immunity was a secondary consideration. COVID may have helped catapult that technology years ahead of schedule in terms of development pipeline. IMO, COVID is going to do for medical science what WWII did for machinery, electronics, and atomic science; we're probably going to start seeing some huge leaps forward in biomedical knowledge and technology coming from theCOVID-centered research initiatives launched all over the world.
Early detection is important for another reason. When trying to kill it you really want to be doing overkill. The less cells it is the less destructive overkill is.