Scientists cure cancer but no one takes notice
Some of the comments made me literally facepalm.
Another scientist says it’s not as simple as it’s made out to be in the first article.
Regardless, I couldn’t help but wonder about the role of state intervention in the medical field with regards to research or the potential interventions that might crop up here.
It’s a wild overstatement. We may, in fact, be overinvesting in cancer research… I think most people would spend their money on improving their quality-of-life unless they or a family member is faced with a terminal illness. It is entirely possible we would all be a lot better off if less money was spent trying to solve intractable terminal illnesses and more money was spent on medical research to improve the quality of life (e.g. regenerative medicine). The whole “we’re saving lives” narrative is borrowed from the State to lend awe and grandeur to medical research. Maybe their efforts would be better spent improving lives rather than trying and failing to save lives that current technology simply cannot save. It is not clear that pouring more resources into the problem is solving it more quickly, either. Going to the moon was an ambitious project but 100% of all the technology and scientific know-how required to do it already existed and had existed for a long time. Nobody had done it before because it’s just pyramid-building. But curing cancer is not like going to the moon… it’s more like going to Alpha Centauri… we have no idea how to do it and there’s no reason to believe that pouring more resources into the problem will help us arrive at a solution any faster.
Clayton -