

I am clever and ambitious. I want to try to cure cancer. Where do I start? - frendiversity

"Where do I start?" is somewhat rhetorical. A major issue is that I feel my ambition would be quickly stunted by the lengthy and difficult decade-long process to get the point where I could start tinkering around with the problem, at which point I may no longer be naive enough to have the confidence to try.<p>I often wonder if making something like "curing cancer" (I know it isn't as simple as that) a concrete, immediate puzzle could be more effective. Kids on the internet often successfully crack security and protections professionally developed by skilled veterans- simply for the sake of anonymous notoriety- perhaps because the puzzle is immediately there for them to try to solve.<p>Perhaps we would focus this application of ambition to more productive problems if they were public and global, instead of sheltered behind thick, opaque layers of academic and corporate organizations.<p>I'm aware that there is a massive amount of training and preexisting knowledge required in tackling this sort of task- but I also can't help wondering how many minds lose their ambition or confidence going through this training and competition, eventually being frustrated or losing sight of the goal.<p>Nevertheless, I'd like to hear your ideas on where to start.
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vitovito
So, a PhD is like an MD without the fieldwork. And a PhD is like this:
<http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/>

What that myopic, institutionally-granted dent in the universe gives you is
the ability to write grants and manage student researchers for a living, but
it's not necessarily going to help you solve cancer.

And let's say you go into the private sector as a bioinformaticist, that might
get you somewhere, except private industry has nothing to gain from cures. A
cured patient is a lost customer. The money is in abatement of symptoms and
suffering for a monthly fee, and so that's what industry optimizes for.

What you, as an outsider, have, that people already there don't have, is the
ability to cross disciplines. (Yes, ability. Talk to a PhD sometime. Most
can't see outside their self-constructed walls until they've been out of
academia for a few years, and they'll always have biases.) Academia doesn't
like this, since it threatens each discipline's carefully drawn territorial
boundaries. But _you_ can do research like this:
[http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/data-science-deep-data-
info...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/data-science-deep-data-information-
paradox.html)

Scroll down to the "Deep data" header and read that part in particular.
There's a potential link between something and migraines, that's pretty much
unexplored. Why? Because to advance in academia, your focus must be incredibly
narrow. It is completely possible and likely that everyone everywhere has just
missed it, because it's not some hugely popular or obvious micro-subject
within the discipline. As an outsider, you can explore across different
problem domains and different branches of medicine and potentially determine
unexplored research avenues.

Gentlemen scientists and inventors of yore discovered new things regularly
partially because there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to be discovered, but
also because the big-S definitions of Science hadn't been codified yet, so
they could pull from what would now be different disciplines without anyone
rapping their knuckles with a ruler:
[http://interconnected.org/home/2011/03/17/finding_baby_scien...](http://interconnected.org/home/2011/03/17/finding_baby_sciences_and_new_moons)

Curing cancer -- which, while a multitude of diseases, comes down to magically
identifying misbehaving cells and killing them -- isn't small-S citizen or
gentleman science. It's royal, big-S science.

But, maybe the way you get there doesn't have to be.

------
paulsutter
Get on a plane and visit everyone doing the most important cutting edge work
in cancer. In person. People love to share their work with an enthusiastic
listener.

Publish a blog to keep track of all the great things that are happening. With
a few hundred hours of effort, you'll be one of the experts on the upcoming
roadmap towards cures for cancers. People will start coming to you for advice.
Let all the VCs in the field know that you're available to help with due
diligence.

Somewhere along the line, while you are following the above plan, you will
just know what you need to do. You will know the maximum leverage activity
that you can contribute towards curing cancer.

And follow the plan above even if you are an introvert. You will see that it's
not too hard. Sure you will have those frozen moments of doubt as you ride the
elevator to meet an esteemed researcher at MIT. But the minute you walk in the
room, and he starts telling you about his work, you will be fine.

~~~
frendiversity
I am going to try this.

------
hirenj
I am always puzzled when people rail against the long process of getting a
PhD, as if this is a symptom of the lumbering university system. I consider
the PhD a maker's schedule for the big problems. There are two types of
complexity that you need to get your head around when trying to cure cancer -
first the complexity of the biological system, and secondly the complexity of
the previous knowledge. The first is well appreciated. The second, however, is
frequently under-appreciated, and represents a sort of technical debt. The
peer review process is not perfect, and so there's a lot of dodgy knowledge
out there that will send you off in the wrong direction. Understanding the
subtleties of the previous knowledge requires both knowledge of the current
system, and a deep understanding of the previous methodologies.

It's not easy. It is however, possible to do. You just need to spend a few
years (3 in the case of my PhD) getting your head into the position where it
contains all this information, after which you can start tackling the problems
at hand. It would be lovely to have cancer research presented as a set of
relatively simple decision points that many eyes can look over, and after
waiting an appropriate amount of time, a solution will be provided. In my
experience, discovery only happens after thinking really, really, really hard.

I guess my main point is that there's no efficient way to scale up the number
of breakthroughs we get. It really comes down to having the right people look
at the right problems. It's a numbers game, and if there's a feeling that not
enough people are sticking with the field because they're being frustrated,
then we'd be better off making scientists less frustrated. The complexity of
the systems ain't going nowhere.

------
srconstantin
The bottom line: go to school.

I'm well aware of the drawbacks of academic science. I'm aware that some of
the best progress happens outside of academia. It's not about that; it's about
resources.

I've been doing some consulting for a company that's working on improving
medical diagnosis (among other things.) I'm trying to build risk models for
diseases based on genetic data. The problem is that this data isn't freely
available. "Open" access data is usually only "open" in the sense that you can
apply for access, and you usually have to be a biology professor to be
considered. It's not like the tech world at all. We're used to open source.
They're not.

If you want to do science, you need access to resources. You need a lab, or
you need experimental data. It's really hard to do that outside of academia.
Heck, it's hard to read journal articles outside of academia.

Going to school, for all its hassles, is essentially free access to resources.
You don't have to be narrowly academia-minded to get an education -- I'm
getting a math PhD, but I'm philosophically closer to the tech industry and I
don't plan to work in academia. Grad school isn't a tribal identity, it's an
opportunity to get what _you_ value out of it.

------
nreece
I recently wrote on the subject. Have a read:

How Can Hackers Help In The Fight Against Cancer? -
[http://www.nilkanth.com/2012/04/18/how-can-hackers-help-
in-t...](http://www.nilkanth.com/2012/04/18/how-can-hackers-help-in-the-fight-
against-cancer/)

------
blakdawg
You might start by reading this:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All-Maladies-
Biography/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All-Maladies-
Biography/dp/1439107955)

.. there isn't one thing called "cancer", there are at least thousands of
different varieties that have different genetic profiles, different behavior
and risk factors, etc.

The thick, opaque layers represent actual human learning and experience and
judgment, and you can't just skip over them because it seems more fun to jump
right to the high-profile heroic stuff. You can't do the good stuff without
learning the rest.

(*Ok, once in awhile people come up with breakthroughs in fields they know
nothing about - and once in awhile a monkey will accidentally type something
intelligible, given a typewriter. We still don't issue typewriters to monkeys
when we need to get some writing done, even if it would work from time to
time.)

------
foxit
Some good suggestions here.

I've considered this issue a lot. Having lost many friends and family members
to cancers of various types, and counting cancer survivors among my friends
and acquaintances, I am very keenly interested in curing cancer.

Right now, being so deeply invested in my own business, I would wish there
were things I could do to simply fund cancer research. But nothing is simple,
and there are a lot of problems with cancer research funding:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html?pagewanted=all)
The comment on that piece that most struck me was from the breast cancer
survivor who eagerly participated in a research study, given that she knew
which carcinogens she'd been exposed to in her lifetime, but found that she
was asked useless questions using research money that could've been well-used
elsewhere. #28 on this page:
[http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/0...](http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html?sort=recommended)

You will quickly find when you research cancer that acquiring a decade's worth
of specialized knowledge isn't going to get you to your goal. It's much better
to have a working knowledge of statistics and the ability to read medical
papers, something you can do with far less than a MD or PhD.

------
mbpp
My suggestion: get an access to databases of academic journals and try to read
research papers. You probably won't understand most of it at first, but you
should get an idea of the subject's terminology and main approaches.

I did that (no formal education, primary interest being in computational
linguistics, YMMV) and found reading original papers a compelling and
effective way of learning.

------
SHOwnsYou
Start by deciding what you want to cure. "Cancer" really is a colloquially
term for what is actually thousands of diseases.

------
arthole
start now. what's holding you back?

I was at a university surplus site today and saw lots of cheap equipment. I'm
assuming you are in love with BioChem... so why not start setting up your own
lab?

If you want to work on a problem, start working on it. you don't know what you
don't know, so follow your interests and your intuition to broaden your
understanding and keep pushing your boundaries. Ask yourself a clear question
and go about answering it. That is the basis of science.

When people say cancer is Big-S science, that tells you more about the kinds
of abstractions being used and questions being asked then about actually doing
science. You can ask different questions.

And maybe you shouldn't think of university as a long blocking task, but
rather as an opportunity to get access to great equipment to run experiments.

------
Mz
Start by defining "cancer". Your ambition is about like announcing that you
want to end communicable diseases (something antibiotics were touted as doing
when they first came out). There are many kinds of cancer. There is no reason
to believe they are all the same thing.

Then define "cure". I have CF. Everyone is begging for a "cure" for it. I
don't think there is such thing because it happens to be a genetic disorder.
So I think looking for a "cure" for CF is like looking for a cure for being
Caucasion. However, I have figured out how to be healthy, which is supposedly
impossible.

Best of luck.

