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by nonbel
3687 days ago
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>"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. |
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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...