[Natanael_L]

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.

[nonbel]

I can't think of any disease where we can't come up with such examples (indicating that the same treatment can't be used in all cases).

[Natanael_L]

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.

[nonbel]

>"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.

[commandar]

I have no idea which documentary you're referring to, but the idea that cancers are a class of different diseases with differing mechanisms isn't exactly fringe.

I mean, here's Harold Varmus, former head of the NIH and a Nobel Prize winner for his work on cancer research:

"What we've learned can be grouped into three categories. First, we've learned that cancer is not simply a single disease that affects many parts of the body. It is not, for example, a "war on cancer" as a single enemy. It is many different diseases with common themes that can cause different kinds of disorders in many of our organs. These include mutations in many different genes, changes in essential cell functions, and unusual interactions with the cellular environment in which tumors grow. We need to study each of these areas separately."

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter13...

[nonbel]

Sorry, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718642

[nonbel]

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:

"The deeper problem is that much of cancer research in the lab—maybe even most of it—simply can’t be trusted. The data are corrupt. The findings are unstable. The science doesn’t work. The resulting waste amounts to more than $28 billion: That’s two dozen Cancer Moonshots misfired in every single year." http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tens... http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

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...