
A disturbing report from the front lines of the war on cancer - mathgenius
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/tough-medicine?mbid=social_facebook
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tokenadult
The submitted article is quite interesting. It is a review of the new book
_The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a
Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--and How We
Can Get There_ by Vincent T. DeVita,[1] and includes many surprising details
from the book's account of the history of cancer treatment research. We see a
lot of gee-whiz submissions to Hacker News of press releases about untested
"cures" for various diseases, many of which have not proven effective over the
years that I have been reading Hacker News. If you are curious about how new
medical research findings turn into standard medical practice--or don't--you
will enjoy reading the article submitted here. I think I will read the book,
as I grew up with a parent who was involved in cutting-edge medical research.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Death-Cancer-Pioneering-
Winnable/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Death-Cancer-Pioneering-
Winnable/dp/0374135606)

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reasonattlm
The trouble with talking to doctors about cancer is that they are in the
business of the possible; the bounds of their world are, rightly, what can you
do better with what you have today. But for cancer what you have today is a
set of pretty terrible tools, and there really isn't much that can be done to
make them very much less terrible other than research and development of new
tools, the very thing that isn't in the remit of most doctors.

This is one of those situations where you have to look forward.

I think I'm willing to wager that first things worthy of the name cure for
cancer will involve temporary suspension of all methods of lengthening
telomeres. Not great for you, but worse for a cancer, and you can wait out its
withering away. The technology exists now to suppress telomerase and the known
ALT gene products via RNAi or similar, with the only challenge being to solve
the problem of reliable tissue coverage every time. All cancers depend on
telomere lengthening, no exceptions. The real path to the defeat of cancer is
to find commonalities, to escape this business of one therapy, one team, one
large budget, one ten year hit-and-miss development process for every single
one of hundreds of narrow subtypes of cancer. The commonalities don't get more
common than telomere lengthening.

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HillaryBriss
This seems to be one of those broad "change the research culture and its
rules" essays rather than anything about a specific technology or scientific
insight that could truly cure cancer.

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xchip
thanks for summarizing

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xchip
typical bait question that takes you to a super long and convoluted article

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pbreit
The mis-quoted headline here doesn't help at all.

Currently on HN: "How to Cure Cancer".

The actual headline: "Tough Medicine - A disturbing report from the front
lines of the war on cancer."

The HTML <title> is indeed "How to Cure Cancer". I wonder if it was changed?

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dang
It was the HTML doc title, always a legit candidate for original title on HN.
In this case, baity though, so we've changed it to one of the alternates.

