f13.net

If I am understanding this article (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/exclusive-cancer--a-cure-just-got-closer-thanks-to-a-tiny-british-company--and-the-result-could-change-lives-of-millions-8707590.html) correctly, they very well may have.  tldr; They found a way to sensitize T-cells to attack cancer cells selectively, through creating an intermediate molecule that attaches to both the T-cells and the cancer cells.

It could be the long-elusive "Magic Bullet", you examine the cancer and the patients T-cells, select a bridge molecule, and *BAM*, bye-bye cancer.

--Dave

(http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/17/i_am_legend_will_smith__1_.jpg)

 :oh_i_see:

It's like these fools skipped class when they taught Jonas Salk.

I'm going to hold any optimism until I see precisely which surface protein they're using as a target.  The problem with treating cancer by immunotherapy is that the surface of the cells are quite similar to healthy cells.  That's been a major hurdle for decades. 

Moore's law.  When you can task millions of systems to protein folding and so forth, it doesn't take long before a roadmap unveils. 

If they've actually cured cancer, I quit smoking too early. Shame they have to deal with pharmaceutical companies. This shit should be published and free for all.

On the other hand, people being unable to afford the cancer cure might finally be enough to tip off the revolution against the capitalist fascists.

Oh, who am I kidding, PS4 is coming out.

Oh they're talking the the pharma co's eh?  It would be surprising when we hear it's not really a cure, but it's something you can keep it from killing you if you take these pills for the rest of your life.

LOL. If this is the real thing, the men who discovered it deserve to be wealthy beyond the capacity of avarice.

If this cure is the cure, how much did it cost them to figure it out? For that matter, how much did it cost them to acquire the knowledge required to even approach the problem? If it was done purely with 100% public funding, then you have a point.

Otherwise, you can decide that it should be free and open-sourced after you've studied to become a medical/bio-chem/whatever professional, and then spent the time (and money) doing the research, and running the tests, and making sure it's reproducible. And since you are, in fact, an angel, that means you don't need money, and you won't die of malnutrition and/or exposure in the meantime.

Look forward to this research yes, being used to produce an expensive endless treatment regimen that you have to take forever instead of an actual cure.

Hutch, there's room to reward the researchers -and- not fleece humanity.

I see where you're coming from, but most truly respectable phD types, who spend their lives researching world-changing solutions, don't marginalize their research by being most concerned with patent law and private equity finance.  That's not the way the best science is done through history.  Matter of fact, it effectively kills the entire scientific process.

What makes it more sickening to me is that it's done on the backs of prior research that led up to them finding and profiting off of theirs.  Like that shitstain that won the last Intel prize (who as well is most concerned with how much ass his patent lawyer is kicking).  When we're talking biology (which involves people's lives) it further complicates things.

If you're going to make money off of research like this, then one needs to do it through manufacturing a viable product and residual celebrity gained from the discovery.  Not the discovery itself.  Jonas Salk died a fairly rich fellow and was an overnight hero/celebrity (a moniker he eschewed - he liked his privacy), yet he potentially forfeited about $4b by not patenting his vaccine.  He'd be rolling over in his grave at the shit that goes on today.  Today's "venture biologist" pretty much want all the monies, all the fame, and none of the inherent ethical responsibility.  Much like Wall Street.   :oh_i_see:

If money was flatly no object to be gained or lost in the pursuit of medical well-being, we'd all live to be 180 and die comfortably (or by accident).  

So much mindless cynicism in this thread. Anyway, I'm not sure why this is news, it was published over 6 months ago, and hasn't exactly been proven to work yet. Monoclonal antibodies are notably fickle and poorly understood.

Also, with respect to the 'Big Pharma will just make a treatment not a cure' can any of you actually give me an example of a curable disease that is currently maintained through treatment alone? There's no broader economic reason to not pursue a cure. If you're merely 'treating' people there's always an incentive for a rival to undermine you with a drug that actually works. A lot of this is just the usual tired arguments. Pharmaceutical companies are not paragons of virtue, but neither are they the world-controlling bogeymen some of you seem to want to think they are.


Not really, the number of possible conformations of protein structures rapidly approaches numbers greater than the number of Planck volumes in the known universe, it's not a problem that's going to be brute forced; Moore's law or otherwise.

You guys can really shit up some good news, you know that?

You are on F13, remember?   :grin:

Also, reality sucks.  So there's that.

'Men' eh Hutch?

Just look at the aids drugs in Africa.  If there is a cure for cancer, poor people will get their hands on it sooner or later.

Poor people don't live long enough to die from cancer, silly.  :why_so_serious:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/testing_starts_creates_homegrown_4jSHWpWFBEkczPTFque7VM

Ah... CD47 markers.  That's some groundbreaking research.  I've been following it since they started working on it in leukemias.  

The big hurdle is the toxicity involved in blocking this protein on the surface of healthy RBC.  It's a delicate balance to target the overexpression of CD47 on cancer cells while not having an immune response to our own RBC which also express more moderate levels of CD47.  

Still worth watching.

See This article in SCIENCE for more information. (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/03/one-drug-to-shrink-all-tumors.html?ref=hp)

To be honest, the cancer is the only real hurdle keeping animals of the earth in check when it comes to aging (you can conquer aging itself, but the cancer will always get you in the end).  You clear that hurdle, all the rest is relatively easy by comparison.  So as much as I'm glad we're getting closer to solving these issues, my eldar family's advice keeps ringing in my ears; "old people gotta die and get outta the way."  But hey, I'm a pure transhumanist, so I say bring it on...  along with permit-required pregnancy, cyborg implants, bioengineered organs, and all that.  Other folk?  Notsomuch.  There will be some ethics to deal with here.

What about telomeres? Seems that we do have a natural clock.  It's just longer than we previously expected.

It's a huge step if it turns out they can actually lower significantly the lethality of cancers in general (especially if the cost of the treatment isn't exorbitant)

Ghambit, your family are an ancient race of elf-like humanoids?  Anyway Nebu, telomeres can be lengthened, it's just that doing so will generally give you cancer (in fact, one of the key mutations necessary for tumors to become cancerous is that they start producing telomerase).

--Dave

Dave:

I assume that you're referring to THIS article (http://www.chc.ucsf.edu/AME_lab/pdfs/Epel_2012.pdf) about telomeres and aging.


It's a very difficult task to lengthen telomeres reliably on an organismal level.   One which we won't solve for quite some time.

Misspelling aside, yeah, same thought.  Someone upthread said we could be living to 180 and my first thought was "Fuck that, people live too long and fuck things up AS IT IS."  70-ear-olds getting upset about gay marriage?  How about 150-year-olds pissed-off all the uppity brown folk want to vote and own property?  Women voting? Get the hell back to your kitchens and shut up.

People need to die for a society to evolve.  Our brains get inelastic long before our bodies die.

Been too busy moping about dad to remind everyone:  Fuck Cancer.

I hope this goes somewhere.

Same. My aunt just went through six weeks of chemo/radiation and then had life-altering surgery and will still have to go through another six weeks of chemo/radiation sometime in the near future, "just to be sure"

Fuck Cancer.

It was me who said 180, because that's the statistical age an "immortal" would die due to un-natural causes, if we consider no social changes whatsoever.  Many studies cite that methuselahs would NOT act very normal though; more like old vampires actually...  living secluded lives, using proxies for everything, and so forth.  I read a book once where the oldest human ended up living on the moon, underground, inside a hermetically sealed suit. 

Anyways, between a cure for cancer and our ability to manipulate pluripotent stem cells (along with the incessant desire to find the methuselah gene, etc.), I'd say we're well on our way to realizing guys' like Kurzweil and DeGrey's visions; that today's young (gen-x and younger) very well could never die. (if they can afford the treatments).   The latest rounds of "chemical nanites" we've been seeing are very intriguing.  It's pure bioengineering.

Now proceed to be making fun of me.   :oh_i_see:

Hey, it's better than your oneiromancy thing.

If my memory serves, something like 80% of people will get Alzheimer's or some other type of dementia by age 85.  Staying sharp mentally beyond that age takes many factors.  Keeping the body alive seems pointless without the mind.  Caloric restriction seems the most reliable way to enhance lifespan... but fuck that.

Yes, that's one of my big concerns. My relatives are in good health, but my grandmother has gone off the deep end. She has ceased to be my grandmother. At what point is my grandmother still alive?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85916/farnsworth_argue_dome.gif)

I had asked one of the neuroscientists here about this. He said that brains age the same as bodies and that barring something that stops or reverses the aging process your brain is going to do what it's going to do. So even if we were able to transplant our brains into 25 year old brainless clones of ourselves your brain still has a bout 100 decent years, give or take. You'd still have the same declines and issues with your mentation, just in a healthier body. So yeah, the 180 living in solitude would be about right. Assuming they hadn't been living with Alzheimer's or dementia for 110 years.

On the cancer front though, hurray. Cancer sucks in general, but last semester was my peds rotation. I was put in Pediatric Oncology and it was the most heart crushing 15 weeks of my life. This was just for my class and I had very little of myself invested in it, it's got to just grind away at the nurses and doctors who specialize in it.

That being said, I don't think we should live much longer than we already do, but I hope that we get to the point where we can lead happy, healthy, fullfilling lives up to the point where we die quickly from old age.

Shut up you.  That's gonna make me rich someday! But damn, that word.. "oneiromancy."  I must steal it.   I assume it's been written somewhere before, or did you just now think of it?  (or did I think of it long ago and simply forget - as usual)

Speaking of which, the best epi. of 'Through the Wormhole' (the brain hack one) sort of glosses over some of my thoughts.  But again, here we go with the ethical dilemmas.

One area where I do have my faith run into a wall is kids with cancer. I don't have any answers there, but I do make it a point to donate every year to research causes and Children's Hospital.

I want to say you used oneironaut which made it sound too much like science.  :why_so_serious:

No, I know I used oneironaut.  But oneiromancy?  Dont think so.  But it's awesome.  /runstowhiteboard

Anyways, back to the brainhack epi.  Some lab has experimentally proven subconscious control from an external source using scent bypass (they layered a suggestion with a scent, wafted the scent during deep sleep, and got a response).  And another lab has unlocked quite a few language keywords just from fMRI data (they can read enough of what you're thinking to essentially interrogate you).  The last interesting segment for me was the TMS one (transcranial mag. stimulation) - wherein they were able to get instantaneous performance enhancement in an archery competition.  We've already cited in here somewhere about that other lab that got raw intelligence enhancement somewhere up around 30% with similar techniques.

Scary times.  Or awesome times.  Depending on your perspective.

Oneiromancy has been a thing since the 1600s.  Also, Carl Jung was known to use the term.

People make too big of a fuss about "immortality" when all they're doing is changing what kills them from old age to accident, violence, or suicide.  The average life expectancy of humans would probably no more than double if we cured every disease and found a way to avoid aging.  Eventually, inevitably, something's going to get you.  Vampires have always amused the hell out of me for that reason; calling someone who bursts into flame at the mere sight of the sun 'immortal' is silly when they probably won't see 35 before someone stakes them, the blinds fall down, or some other random mishap offs them.

Yup unless we were also given some kind of massive regeneration capability eventually the law of averages would get everybody. If you live 200+ years your chance of slipping on soap and breaking your neck or more likely a car accident becomes much more likely. The one weird downside of this kind of longevity would be sever risk aversion behaviors. If people know they are effectively immortal if they avoid random doom I wonder how many hugh heffner type people you wind up getting avoiding anything even potentially dangerous in an attempt to live forever.

Well, there's that and there's also the problem that most people, by 90 years of age, are decrepit beyond the ability to even care for themselves.  Mucking with the mortality genes may not change that eventuality one bit. 

This is why solving Cancer is an important step.  There are many very old people with negligible senescence, but almost always in the end either a) a sudden heart attack kills them or b) cancer gets them. 
Modern cancer research and a burgeoning tissue engineering industry are solving those two problems.  The closer we get, the healthier people will yearn to live.

Think on this too, most older folk KNOW their expectancy isn't much better if they bust their asses being "healthy." (there are natural stopgaps that limit the benefits)  So they dont, enter decrepitude, and drain the medical system in their wake.

Isn't "curing cancer" also going to make space travel more viable when some of the effects (radiation carcinogenesis) of solar radiation etc will be more manageable (though other degenerative tissue effects still remain)?

That is one of the least pressing obstacles in space travel and one of the least important reasons to cure cancer, but I suppose so.

As a general rule, however, I agree that our goal for immortality should be the extension of youth rather than the extension of age... and cancer isn't really the big destroyer of quality-of-life that basic muscular and immune system degeneration is. The truly tragic cancers are those of childhood, like leukemia, and those of early adulthood like brain, breast, uterine, cervical and testicular. Skin, lung, stomach, liver, and prostate are just bonuses.

Politicians are doing a great job at extending youth.  There are more 30 year olds living at home with their parents than ever!  :why_so_serious:

Oh, that's good. Please tell me you came up with that.

I did, but I'm sure others have thought it.

As for the space program, that's brilliant.  We can send all the old people into space!

To fight Aliens! (http://"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man's_War")