Well there must be some things they all have in common. Anaerobic environment I thought, is that still the case? No transport of oxygen via iron possible, in my layman's memory?
Like saying suffocating in vacuum and suffocating from oxygen substitution in an enclosed space (like by inert gasses) is equal. The causes are different enough that different solutions are necessary.
It looks just like the "string theory landscape", next you will be told that we need to stop worrying about comparing predictions to evidence when it comes to cancer research. Just wait a few years/decades.
Can you fit the space suit? (maybe I should have said something about small spaces).
Just because there's a shared behavior there's no guarantee there's a shared cause or mechanism. And even when there are, the environment can make any given solution unusable.
Yep. For example, there's people so strongly allergic to medicines that normally would be the default choice for curing a variety of diseases, making them unusable for these people.
Then there are even more "fun" special cases of simultaneously occurring diseases where the cure for one makes the other disease more dangerous.
But the point regarding cancer is that it just really ISN'T a single disease. That's like calling rockets, hot-air balloons, airplanes and helicopters the same thing. Sure, they all fly, but the mechanisms for them all are drastically different.
Cancers are the collection of diseases which causes cells to replicate uncontrollably.
>"But the point regarding cancer is that it just really ISN'T a single disease."
No, this is just a recent meme people started repeating because it said in a documentary or something. It is just as much "one disease" as many other medical issues grouped together as "one disease".
It is an awful meme too, because it discourages looking at commonalities and gives poorly performing researchers an excuse for not figuring anything out. Both of which slow the process of understanding cancer.
Nesting is getting too deep, regarding:
>"I mean, here's Harold Varmus..."
He has to say stuff like that as head of NCI. The slow progress is even noted on wikipedia, everyone knows it. This "cancer is so complicated" idea is being used as an "excuse" (not that it is definitely false):
"Though there has been significant progress in the understanding of cancer biology, risk factors, treatments, and prognosis of some types of cancer (such as childhood leukemia[2]) since the inception of the National Cancer Act of 1971, progress in reducing the overall cancer mortality rate has been disappointing.[5][31] Many types of cancer remain largely incurable (such as pancreatic cancer[39]) and the overall death rate from cancer has not decreased appreciably since the 1970s.[40] The death rate for cancer in the U.S., adjusted for population size and age, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer
Before accepting that reason for the slow progress, we should consider that some are reporting only 10% of what gets published can be reproduced:
"Although we in the cancer field hoped that this would lead to more effective drugs, historically, our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low1. Sadly, clinical trials in oncology have the highest failure rate compared with other therapeutic areas."
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...
Also, people are quitting cancer reproducibility projects out of disgust for the low quality of the research:
"Early on, Begley, who had raised some of the initial objections about irreproducible papers, became disenchanted. He says some of the papers chosen have such serious flaws, such as a lack of appropriate controls, that attempting to replicate them is “a complete waste of time.” He stepped down from the project's advisory board last year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1411
Others are estimating pretty much 50% of all biomed can't be reproduced:
Even Robert Wienberg refers to cancer research as an example of "Augean Stables":
"'It’s a naÏveté that by simply embracing this ethic, which sounds eminently reasonable, that one can clean out the Augean stables of science,' says Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
http://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-sc...