Not sure what you mean do you mean non first world countries have little hospital treatment or care?
This reminds me of some the threads sweat209 created about lack on progress on a whole lot of fronts, including fighting cancer. There’s some good information (unfortunately wasted on that user) in those threads.
Other thing that a lot of people are getting now is Alzheimer’s and dementia this is overwhelmingly the healthcare system.
Mostly better treatment.
Just one data point, but for what I have (CLL), early detection generally has little value.
I don’t think we do eradicate cancer. Not unless we genetically modify human zygotes to be more like elephants. (Elephants ought to get cancer, and don’t. And why they don’t has been worked out. Which is a huge advance in biology, but not anything that can be used in medicine.) Cancer is something that happens to cells that don’t die of old age.
I think cancer gets more treatable and the treatments get less damaging to the rest of the body, and many people live with cancer until they die of something else.
Huh? Those are overwhelmingly things that happen to people who survive long enough for their brains to start wearing out.
Is there some thing that Elephants have that they don’t get cancer? Could we use some thing that they have that they don’t get cancer?
Yes, they have about 50 copies of a gene that we have one copy of. That’s why it would take genetic modification of human zygotes for it to be helpful.
(And it’s not clear that there wouldn’t be other consequences to having a lot of extra copies of the gene.)
Eta:
What can elephants teach us about cancer? - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News.
You can try requesting the full text for my abstract here:
I think the answer is that there are hospitals and care in most of the world, but if everything isn’t done perfectly, treatment is much less likely to succeed.
Also, essential meds may be unaffordable until they have gone off patent for at least a few years.
“Eradicate cancer” is nonsense, pure and simple. You may as well blather on about “eradicate death” or “eradicate aging”.
If that’s your measure of merit, it’s hopeless even talking about the topic with you.
Well, yeah; this would mean things are going well.
See, as you age, if you don’t die of something else first, you will eventually get cancer. It’s a statistical certainty, because your cells are constantly dividing and with each division there is a chance that a cell will make a mistake, or really more than one, and that it will lose three things:
- The ability to stop growing
- The ability to recognize other cells in your body and share resources with them
- The ability to signal your immune system ‘something is wrong, terminate me’
With those three things gone, the cell will replicate out of control, forming cancer.
Again, statistically speaking, if you live long enough without something else getting you, this will eventually happen.
Incidentally, this may also be why whales don’t suffer much from cancer.
Whales have more cells than us which means more chances for things to go wrong and therefore more cancerous tumors. However, whales are SO big that a tumor has to grow a lot before it is harmful, and the thing about cancer cells is that they mutated to get this way, and they can mutate again. In fact, being already messed up, cancer cells are more likely to mutate than regular cells.
Just as regular cells can mutate in ways that mess up replication (causing cancer), that lump of out of control cells can mutate again, cannibalizing itself and dying off.
In humans, by the time this happened, you’d have so much cancer in you that you’d be dead, but apparently it happens to whales all the time.
It’s called Peto’s Paradox.
I used to think that anyone alive was born too early for genetic therapy, but as I understand it techniques like CRISPR would actually allow us to do stuff like add these genes into a living cell. The issue would be delivering the virus to all the necessary cells, but with something like cancer, maybe you start with just the cells around the tumor?
Part of it, like the whales, is simply their size. Tumors don’t last forever and an elephant is large enough that a tumor that would kill a human doesn’t hurt them much.
I think the below is correct,
It’s a statistical certainty, because cells are constantly dividing and with each division there is a chance that a cell will make a mistake, that every human has, and has had, at least one cancer.
Fortunately 3, above, catches almost all of them.
Yeah, absolutely. Cancers are an incredibly specific line up of multiple mutations. Without all of them, the body can kill the cancer, or the cancer kills itself.
I think statements like “If you don’t die of something else first, you will eventually get cancer. " need to be better phrased. Since " If you don’t die of something else first, you will eventually die of X.” is true for any fatal X. E.g., " If you don’t die of something else first, you will eventually die from heart failure."
One advance that has affected us personally is the osteoporosis medication Forteo. It has tremendously helped MrsFtG. It is incredibly expensive right now if you don’t have the right insurance as well as being a daily shot, but down the road this drug and similar ones are going to change things for a lot of people.
Not getting cancer, and not dying of cancer, are different things. To re-answer their question, elephants have many copies of a gene that appears to actively suppress tumors.
More generally, there’s Peto’s paradox, which describes how larger animals don’t have a proportionately higher appearance of cancer (despite having more cells).
Peto’s Paradox: Evolution’s Prescription for Cancer Prevention - PMC (nih.gov)
No, it’s the opposite. Tumors grow uncontrollably, and kill large animals (like humans.) And in general, the odds of getting a tumor increase with greater body size and longer life. (More cells and more cell reproductions.) Elephants ought to all die of cancer, except they almost never get cancer. Probably, their ability to avoid cancer (by damaged cells killing themselves rather than promulgating, really really reliably!) was an important in allowing them to grow so large in the first place.
There have been a lot of attempts to tweak genes in living people. Hemophilia and sickle cell disease are two serious illnesses caused by a single flawed gene that is well understood. But and large, messing with a gene causes the immune system to recognize the modified cells as foreign and kill them. In fact, the mRNA vaccines are an offshoot of that research. “Hey, we can use that immune response”." Those vaccines don’t need an adjudant because the modified cell spitting out the viral protein already triggers the immune system. Sadly, modified cells that spit out insulin or human clotting factor tend to do the same.
I have seen some recent attempts to modify the genes of living people (with sickle cell disease) so maybe there have been advances. Or maybe those, like prior attempts, will work for a while and then be taken down by the immune system. But building what elephants have is a really large change, not a tiny tweak. It’s possible someone will do it to a human egg, and that will be successful. I don’t expect to see that kind of generic modification of already-born humans in my lifetime.
Ninja’d! Except your post is way more informative.
As I’ve said before, 30 years ago MS was a slow death sentence. Now it is just an expensive nuisance.