[yaakov34]

I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition.

Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are mortal. And it's not limited to cancer. It used to be, in the bad old days, that some people became almost completely bedridden as their joints gave out, and then either died early or wished they did; now we have arthritis medications and joint replacement surgeries that let many of them (not all, but very many) enjoy decades of their retirements. Does this lessen the need for future orthopedic treatment? Obviously not, since it extends their lives and keeps them on their feet long enough to develop other joint problems. Does that make orthopedics and rheumatology pointless? As someone who needed the intervention of rheumatologists, I assure you that it doesn't.

In the case of cancer, nobody believes that one can make people live forever by curing their cancers; of course, they will live long enough to die of something, maybe even another cancer. Still, I personally know people in their 70s and 80s who would have been dead and buried 20 years ago if it wasn't for cancer treatment; and the idea of the "cancer moonshot" is to give the same chance to a lot more people. I came home today after visiting a very dear friend whose cancer is, with the current level of medicine, close to untreatable. Will she live forever if some treatment is developed for it? Well of course not. Would it be worthwhile to change the several months that she has left to live into several years? Of course, and yes, it would mean that she would require more cancer treatment, not less.

We can debate if the "moonshot" model is right for cancer (personally, I think it has merits), but these pseudo-profound dismissals of medicine are simply vulgar and annoying.

[maxander]

I was about to post the same- the article has such a "nothing is worth doing" level of pessimism about medicine that halfway through I was wondering if the author was suffering from depression.

He's right that an ever-older population will bring about more cancers- so we'd better have ways to treat them. And he's right that the "cancer moonshot" likely won't provide the singular, all-out cure, but no one outside of politicians claims it would; instead it will help provide partial cures that can reclaim thousands of healthy human-life-years, a worthy use of the money. That a professor of medicine draws such a poor picture of these issues sounds downright pathological.

[pc2g4d]

The author acknowledged significant advances in cancer treatment, including one he called a moon landing in its own right (immunotherapy). No need to cast aspersions on his mental state---I think he's clear-eyed yet not despairing, facing the difficulties of cancer treatment (it's like stopping evolution from happening, if you think about it) but still recognizing the progress.

[maxander]

True enough that I shouldn't bandy about accusations of depression. But the author derides a billion-dollar cancer research effort as "pointless" in the title. He may recognize the progress, but he's bizarrely adamant that people won't cure cancer.

[97s]

I totally agree. I was diagnosed with Leukemia(AML) at age 24. I am 31 now. I had cancer 2 times, both times 20 years before it would have killed me, but because of all the research I get to be alive, I have a son and a wife and a family who I impact every day. Sure I understand I am more prone to getting more cancers down the road, but having the road to go down is way better than a dead end at age 24. Keep the moonshot going baby.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A while ago I was reading a harrowing description of life in the 1930s. One of the author's memories was the sound of a neighbour in a nearby house screaming - and screaming, and screaming - in unbearable pain while dying of cancer.

We've definitely moved on since then. Moonshot or no, anything that helps make that experience less likely has to be a good thing.

[DrScump]

That neighbor's tumor type could still well be incurable, but palliative care and pain management have improved significantly since then.

[ams6110]

Possible I guess, but we had morphine in the '30s and probably a lot easier to get than today.

[vectorpush]

Totally agree. I'll also add that we don't even need to definitively eradicate the possibility of cancer to consider it effectively "cured". If we can reduce the rate of cancers such that they only start to appear in populations that are approaching, say, 80+ years of age, it will probably become more effective to focus on other leading causes of death rather than dwelling on cancers that end up killing people in their 100s (if general life expectancy rises to the point where cancer becomes endemic among the bustling 100+ age demographic, we can cross that bridge when we come to it)

[yaakov34]

Yeah, we'll definitely want a "dementia moonshot", or a few, before we attempt to create a generation of centenarians. However, cancer incidence climbs terrifyingly rapidly when people reach their 60s - long before we are ready to give up on them. A successful cancer moonshot (and the Nixon one, by the way, was quite successful) will let millions of people enjoy many good years with their loved ones; not to mention that it would also save many young people from dying of cancer, although that's a much smaller share of cancer patients.

[XorNot]

My otherwise healthy grandfather is going to be killed by cancer in the next few months. And for what seems like an utterly stupid reason: if they cut it all out of his neck, there's no way currently to replace the lymph nodes he'd lose or create enough replacement tissue to cover it over.

Actually coming to grips with the idea that a seemingly mundane engineering issue is what gets him was surprising.

Give that problem 10 years and I suspect I'll read the news one day and hear about how we've now solved it.